


Dream On

by jemariel



Category: Supernatural
Genre: (brief and in a dream), (in passing at least), (kinda), Bisexual Dean Winchester, Canon-Typical Violence, Case Fic, Closeted Dean, Dancing, Dean/Benny - Freeform, Dean/Many Castiels, Destiel - Freeform, Dream Sequences, Dream Sex, Dreams, Dreamsharing, First Kiss, First Time, Frottage, Getting Together, I promise this isn't entirely dream sequences, M/M, Oh hell dream sequences, Oral Sex, POV Castiel, POV Dean Winchester, Sam Ships It, Somnophilia, Team Free Will, Wet Dream, Winged Castiel, Winged Dean Winchester, almost anal sex, dean/cas - Freeform, nightclub Dean, team everyone switches forever
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-11
Updated: 2017-08-17
Packaged: 2018-12-13 22:05:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 22,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11769318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jemariel/pseuds/jemariel
Summary: Cas can’t stay out of Dean’s dreams. It starts as an accident; It becomes a guilty addiction. But actions have consequences, and Dean was bound to find out eventually.In which Cas is totally not a creepy stalker, and Sam and Dean eat cheese.Not a WIP, completely written and will be posted within a week.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to my first ever Supernatural fic and also the longest thing I’ve ever written for public consumption! *nervous nail biting* Please let me know what you think!
> 
> This spans roughly season 5 through 9-ish, but it sort of ignores canon except when convenient so.... freeform I guess! ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> This is not a WIP, it's completed and more or less ready to post, 3 chapters and a coda (and no it is not entirely dream sequences, even I'm not that bad). Will be posted over the next week or two.

.i

Cas can’t stay out of Dean’s dreams.

At first it’s an accident. The long hours when the human body requires rest leave him with little to do but make observations, and Dean just happens to be a particularly interesting study. 

Three hours earlier Dean had pushed away the last of his post-hunt chow main and declared it bedtime. Sam had stayed up a little longer writing up notes on the case -- a simple salt-and-burn that had left the brothers grinning with the satisfaction of an uncomplicated victory. Rare enough these days. Now, the only illumination in the shabby little motel room is the clock -- 3:29 am -- the blue neon glow of the Vacancy sign outside, and the occasional roving beam of headlights on the highway. Sam is starfished across the bed on his belly, one foot hanging off the edge; Dean is flat on his back with one arm thrown above his head and the other hand resting over his heart. Cas, as always, watches over them. 

It isn’t wholly intentional, the way his gaze always seems to rest on Dean. He looks boyish in sleep: limbs flung wide, his face tucked into the crook of his elbow. He’s not snoring, exactly -- the snores come from Sam -- but the shallow shuffling of his breathing has a different cadence and texture than when he’s awake. It’s... hypnotic. Soporific, even for a celestial being with no need to sleep.

Castiel blinks, and just like that he is in another place -- the back seat of the Impala, rumbling through a sun-soaked wheat field, golden flecks of chaff gleaming in the air under a blue, blue sky. Dean is driving, singing something that Cas doesn’t recognize.

He does not wonder long where he is. Human dreams are distinct in their quality.

He should announce himself immediately. Showing up like this, as an uninvited interloper in the private mechanisms of the subconscious, is hardly polite. But before Cas can even open his mouth to do so, Dean has pushed his head and shoulders out through the open car window. (The Impala stays her course, held steady by the infallible logic of dreamland.) He pulls and climbs until he is standing implausibly on the edge of the car door -- then launches himself into the air with a triumphant cackle. Cas hesitates for a handful of heartbeats, then follows, scrambling out the back window with significantly less grace. Dean is rising straight up, already a vaguely human-shaped speck, showing no sign of a change in his trajectory. Castiel rises swiftly after him. The car, the field, the black ribbon of road, they fall away beneath them at a dizzying pace, and Dean’s joy ripples in waves through golden air all around. Higher and higher they climb without the beating of wings or roar of engines. They rise until they skim the bottoms of the clouds, until they are face to face with the sun. The road dwindles to a scuff in the golden earth below them; the clouds are shifting islands in a sea of air.

It is _exhilarating._ Cas can taste the emotion, effervescent and tangy, bubbling through the ether. Dean’s fears of flying in the real world have no purpose here, no meaning. He is all whoops of laughter, tumbling acrobatics, childlike and exuberant. Castiel swoops in and out around the clouds, trying to catch up to him, but then... slows. He finds that he doesn’t actually want to be discovered here. He cannot bear to tarnish this by revealing to Dean that he has an audience. He may only have a fledgling grasp on human nature, but he feels certain that Dean would be embarrassed to be caught in such an unguarded moment. But he also does not want to leave. This is such a rare side of Dean to see, and Castiel feels a warm rush of affection to know that it’s here. He wants to stay and cherish it for as long as it lasts.

So he stays quiet, hidden, basking in Dean’s joy.

When Cas blinks again, he is back in the dim blue of the hotel room. The clock reads 3:41; Dean has rolled onto his side, shoulder rising pale in the diffuse light, marked by a healing handprint. Castiel draws in a deep breath, shakes himself. 12 minutes. It had seemed like hours.

“Hmmrnrfngnggg...” Dean grumbles in his sleep. Cas squints, cocks his head to one side. There is nothing to be interpreted in that. He finds himself smiling anyway, still feeling warm all over from his visit. It probably shouldn’t have happened but he is, perhaps selfishly, so very glad that it did.

~*~

“Dean?”

“What’s up Cas?”

“I’m not sure I understand the point of this place. Why would people drive this far off the highway for such an obvious collection of fakery?”

“Take a look around, Cas -- I’m not sure many do. Hey! Check it out!”

“’Mystery Shack is Where It’s At’?”

“What? It’s catchy! Here, try it on.”

“I don’t think I want to advertise this place on my shirt, Dean.”

“Aw come on, I didn’t say you had to buy it. Here, this too.”

“Please take that off my head.”

“Oh and these!”

“Dean --”

“I just wanna take a couple pictures! Show Sammy what he’s missing!”

“I thought we were here to do a job.”

“We are! Doesn’t mean we can’t have a little fun first.”

“You have a strange idea of fun. ... Oh.”

“Somethin catch your eye?”

“This is a genuine Sasquatch tooth. And it’s recently shed. I thought they were extinct.”

“See? There’s a few real mysteries at the Mystery Shack. C’mon, let’s go find that big guy. That kid’s watching us again and he looks too smart for his own good.”

~*~

The next time it happens, Castiel almost exits immediately. He is aware of the personal nature of dreams; last time was an indulgence that he should not repeat. He’s a little disturbed to even find himself in this position again. But as he turns to go, a flash of white porcelain catches his eye. It’s a figure on a shelf -- a figurine of an angel, the kind that mothers comfort their children with when they have bad dreams or are frightened of the monsters in their closets. He takes another look around. This is not just any house. He would know this house anywhere. This is the house where Dean and Sam should have grown up.

Dean is nowhere to be seen, but he hears movement from elsewhere in the house. Slowly, carefully, Castiel moves to the door just in time to see a tiny figure race past and dash down the hall. Freckle-faced, bottle-green eyes, short-cut blondish hair -- unquestionably Dean, revisiting the happier moments of his childhood. There is joy here, but it is different than in the dream of flying. Where that was exhilarating, this feels like a warm blanket on a snowy day. This is safety; for Dean that is certainly something to be joyful about.

He knows, in a hazy sort of way, that this is an invasion of privacy, but that is a concept for which he has little frame of reference. In Heaven, amongst the angels of his garrison, there was no need for privacy. It’s one of many important aspects of daily life with humans that he has had to have explained to him, mostly by Dean, along with things like personal space and when to obscure the truth. But he is viscerally, intimately familiar with curiosity, and that easily wins the day.

He follows quietly, a safe distance behind the young boy charging through the house. There is laughter echoing off of all the walls, more golden sunshine streaming in through the windows. Cas stands for a while in the hallway, watching the dust motes float in a sunbeam, breathing in the smell of warm wood and pastry. It occurs to him where he has seen that color before -- it is not only sunlight, and the same sunlight that suffused the dream of flying. It is the light of Dean’s soul. Cas reaches up to cup the sunbeam in his outstretched palm.

It merely reflects off his skin, but it is so very warm to the touch.

Castiel stands there for a long time watching the light play over his fingers. Slowly, though, he becomes aware that the echoes of laughter have faded, and the light grows dim when he pulls his out hand from under it. He looks around -- the walls are gray now where before they were rich wooden brown. The swaddling blanket of safety has turned cold, constricting tight around Castiel’s throat.

Dean is nowhere to be seen. Castiel moves cautiously through the hallway, down the stairs. He stops on the landing because Dean is sitting at the bottom, fully grown now with his head in his hands.A tremulous whine trickles out of him to tug on Castiel’s heartstrings.

The light through the windows dims down into gloom; once-warm walls start to weep, wet and black. Dark water seeps through the moulding, up through the floorboards, drips from the ceiling until the house begins to flood. And all the while Dean keens in anguish, broken with sobs.

When Castiel blinks awake, it feels like he’s clawing his way up from the icy depths of an ocean. Dean’s sleeping form is blurry in the darkness -- and then he blinks, and the well of tears on his lashes streaks hot down his cheeks. He can see him now, curled up in a fetal position and shivering under the blanket. Cas’s heart clenches to see it; he reaches out on instinct. But his hand stops short of where it wants to rest on Dean’s hair, or maybe his back. Maybe he just wants to take Dean in his arms altogether, hold him close, tight. Keep him warm. Keep him safe.

He cannot. But perhaps he can do the next best thing.

These rooms usually have a spare blanket or two in a drawer somewhere. Cas guesses right on the first try and pulls out a soft, heavy blanket of some fuzzy synthetic material. A few shakes of the folds and Castiel drapes the blanket over Dean as carefully as he can so as not to disturb him, tucking it around his shoulders and up to his chin. In a few moments he is not shivering so hard, and Cas breathes a little easier.

~*~

Dean’s empty beer bottle thumps where he sets it on the table. “Well,” he says. “For a pair of werewolves, that could have gone worse, right?” His smile is strained, like he’s trying to remind his face how it’s done, bullying muscles into doing what he needs them to do.

“Could have gone better, too.” Sam is worrying at the label of his own beer with a thumbnail, staring into the middle distance. Cas wonders if he is remembering the wife whose husband had turned her against her will, or the four year old child who had lost both parents to the Winchesters’ silver bullets before they’d even known of her existence. She is with her grandmother now, two towns over and verified human.

“Most things do tend to fall between those two extremes,” Cas points out. Both brothers stare at him for a handful of seconds before first Dean, then Sam, cracks into surprised laughter.

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Dean says. He hauls himself to his feet and claps a hand on Castiel’s shoulder as he passes by. “I’m hitting the showers. We can sleep in some tomorrow, it’s only a few hours back to Bobby’s.”

Cas turns in his chair to watch the slow stretch of Dean’s shoulders as he shuffles toward the bathroom door, scratching at the back of his head. It has been one long hunt in a string of long hunts, and exhaustion is clear in the tilt of Dean’s shoulders and the drag of his heels on the carpet. Castiel hopes that the brothers will sleep well tonight.

Of course, they would not be so lucky. Two hours after Dean drops off to the see-saw of Sam’s snores, Cas hears a rustle in the sheets. First slow, susurrus, then quicker. Agitated. Cas turns to see Dean’s face bathed in slow-blinking red neon light from outside. His lips are parted, his forehead creased and shining with sweat, legs tangling up in the sheet with his restless movements. “Nnnn--” he moans, “No -- NO!”

Castiel would like to say that the decision costs him something. That he considers for even a moment that this action might have consequences.

In truth, he barely spares the blink of an eye.

It’s dark. Blood-drenched. The stench is overwhelming. There are teeth and glowing eyes in a ring all around him, tearing chunks out of Dean’s flesh that never actually disappear, but remain to be torn out over and over again.

Hellhounds.

Dean is racing blind down ever-narrower tunnels, through dark and twisting woods thick with roots and branches, the snapping of the hounds always at his heels. There is a light -- Sam, the light is Sam; long-haired gangly-limbed Sam and short, mop-headed, soft-faced Sam, and small squirming crying Sam all swaddled in blankets. Dean reaches desperately to propel his brother away from the bloody jaws closing in on all sides.

“SAM” Dean’s cry shatters like a lightning strike through the dreamscape. Sam stops, turns, and Dean shouts again “NO!” But it’s too late, and the fangs that rip into Sam’s flesh are not the dark bloody wild forces closing in around them, but Dean’s own teeth, jaws clamped crushing-tight around Sam’s throat. Brother’s blood explodes iron-hot and red on Dean’s tongue, thick and viscous over his lips and swallowed down his throat --

Castiel’s hand burns white as he reaches out to catch Dean by the wrist and reel him in. As soon as he’s got him he spreads his wings wide and with one strong beat propels them out of this hellish nightmare. Castiel blinks hard, focuses on the golden clouds, blue sky, euphoria and freedom that he knows exists here in the limnal space of Dean’s dreams. He holds tight to the vision of that dream, breathes light into the expanding space around them. This time, when he opens his eyes, they are approaching the clouds from the other direction, drifting down as gentle as feathers toward a soft, silver-lined landscape.

Dean is trembling in his arms. Cas had almost forgotten that the soul he has clutched to his chest is not the raw scrap of gold that he once rescued from Hell, but a breathing flesh and blood human -- sort of. He loosens his arms enough to look down at Dean, who is still shaking and staring with eyes shocked-wide. The stains of blood on his face are drying to rust-dust and flaking away in the breeze. Dean’s breathing slows and eases gradually as they drift, and by the time they are passing the huge cumulonimbus masses he is composed enough to lift his face from Cas’s chest.

He looks up at Cas, his eyes still round as coins. And yet he smiles, just an upward tic of his open mouth, a huff of not-quite-laughter. 

And Castiel can no longer be here.

He stumbles back into place in the motel room shaking with self-directed fury. Stupid, stupid. To invade Dean’s dreams unintentionally was bad enough, but to actively interfere --

And yet...

And yet when he turns to stare at Dean, now peaceful except for the confused quirk in his brow, Castiel cannot feel sorry for his actions. His fury ebbs to make room for sullen conviction. He couldn’t have sat idly by while Dean was obviously suffering. He had to intervene. Had to help. Surely Dean would understand that.

But this is it, he tells himself. This has to be the last time.

~*~

It is not the last time.

In fact, peering into Dean’s dreams becomes a guilty addiction. Cas can’t help it -- he is fascinated, drawn in by the liquid gold of Dean’s soul.

At first his indulgences are weeks or even months apart. Gradually, weeks turns into days, and then every night he thinks he can get away with it. He learns Dean’s recurring dreams -- the flying dream, for example, occurs whenever Dean manages to find a grain of peace in his life, some measure of satisfaction. Cas watches Dean’s father teach him to drive, puzzled at first by the normalcy but then slowly coming to understand the longing behind it. He watches Dean scream at an impassive face that changes from John Winchester to Azazel to Sam to Lucifer to Dean himself, never responding with even a flicker of emotion. He sits behind Dean as he fishes on countless similar, but not identical, placid lakes and never catches a thing. He is treated to silly dreams, like the one of an alien gladiator arena and a blue box that is bigger on the inside. Cas thinks he recognizes it from an old TV show they had watched before sleeping that night, starring a man with curly hair and a ludicrously long scarf. Some dreams are simple scenes and expressions of feeling but others are vividly detailed stories, however nonsensical. Like the one that takes place in a kind of institutional labyrinth, the halls lined with lockers, which stars several bumble bees the size of small dogs acting as one unified consciousness. Castiel was disappointed when Dean awoke before that one could reach its conclusion.

The first time he sees himself in one of Dean’s dreams is... surreal, to say the least.

The dream takes place in a bar. It is not crowded, so Cas keeps close to the wall, in the shadows. There is music, a stage, a microphone. Dean is singing. Cas has only seen him do kareoke once, when Dean was very drunk, and while he doesn’t have a bad voice, Cas does notice that his wishful-thinking subconscious has smoothed out the rough edges.

 _“Karma karma karma karma karma Chameleoooooooooon,”_ he croons, _“You come and goooo... You come and gooooooooooo!”_

Cas frowns in confusion. These lyrics make no sense. Perhaps they are a manifestation of the dream? Cas looks around the room, entertained by Dean’s musicality and trying to parse whether this dream has a purpose or if it is just the churning of the cerebral undertow. There are a few people milling about, a mix of men and women. One man is seated closer to the stage than the others, with familiar dark hair and wearing a trenchcoat --

The shock almost throws him out of the dream, and for a moment Castiel wonders if Dean is aware of his presence. But no. He can’t be. Cas hasn’t revealed himself, and he, the real Cas, is still back in the shadows, not treated to a front row seat. This other him, then, must exist in Dean’s own sleeping mind. The thought that Dean is dreaming about him sends a cascade of outlandish sensations through Castiel’s stomach, fluttering and clenching.

_“Loving would be easy if your colors were like my dreeeeams... Red gold and greeeeen, red gold and greeeeeeeeen --”_

Apparently Dean only knows those two lines, because they repeat over and over ad nauseum. Castiel watches Dean reach out a hand to -- to Cas, to the other him -- and draw him up on the stage to sing directly to him, keeping hold of that hand and swaying their bodies from side to side to the rhythm. Cas catches a glimpse of his own face in the bar’s spotlights, looking blissful, totally at peace with the world. Castiel isn’t certain it’s an expression he has ever worn, in this vessel or any other, and he certainly knows nothing like it in his true form. For a wistful moment Castiel wonders what would happen if he stepped out of the shadows. Wonders, if Dean knew he was there, if he would sing to him too -- the real him -- and he could steal just a little bit of that happiness for himself.

~*~

The next day while they are driving, Castiel learns that the strange song is in fact real and makes just as little sense in reality as it did in the dream. “Man, what is with this town?” Dean gripes. “This is supposed to be their classic rock station, but this is the third time they’ve played this song since we got here. Can’t get it out of my frickin head.” He shakes his head in woe, but no later than the second chorus Castiel catches him drumming his fingers on the wheel and nodding his head. He has to turn his face to the window so that Dean won’t catch him smiling.

 

.ii

 

“Killer cheese? Come on. Seriously?”

“Seriously,” Sam confirms. “Well, sort of. The deaths are classic Dreamwalker strikes, and all of the victims recently purchased the new Stilton from Harvest Moon Creamery at the farmer’s market.”

“I dunno, still sounds witchy to me,” Dean says, leaning back and chewing on a pencil eraser.

“Maybe, but we haven’t found a single hexbag in the whole town. And there’s no other connection between the victims, the deaths aren’t related to any phase of the moon or other planetary cycle....” Sam spreads his hands, still glancing over his notes. “My money’s on a rogue Dreamwalker picking off anyone whose dreams are getting a little extra boost from the Stilton.”

Dean chews on the pencil for a few more moments, nodding. “Huh. ... So we just -- what, have a midnight snack, conk out, and hope we can figure out how to kill it on its home turf?” He might be coming around to the killer cheese idea, but he still has one eyebrow cocked as high as it will go. “That’s gotta be one of your stupidest plans ever. What if we can’t kill it? Or what if we forget what the hell we’re doing because we’re in the middle of a REM cycle? We’ll end up the same way the vics did.”

Sam doesn’t look much happier about it, but he is determined. “There’s more,” he says. “Once we’re asleep, we’ll be on our own. This isn’t like African dream root where it links you -- we’ll just be in our own heads.” He takes a deep, steeling breath. “There’s a chance it will split its efforts, try to go for both of us. That might make it easier to kill.”

Dean points a finger. “You’re reaching. That’s one hell of a maybe to hang our brains on.” He gets to his feet, a serious ‘no way in hell’ expression all over his face. “Cas, tell him he’s being an idiot.”

Castiel starts. This whole case has made him uncomfortable from the outset, and he cannot tell either of the brothers why. “I would prefer not to be put in the middle of this,” he says, and hopes he can just go back to trying not to be noticed.

But Sam is suddenly looking at him like a hound who caught the scent. “Cas! I totally forgot! You can go into people’s dreams, right?”

Cold dread seeps under Cas’s ribs and he tries very very hard not to look at Dean. “Yes,” he growls, “but --”

“Then you can watch us,” Sam barrels on, “And if you notice one of us starting to -- I dunno, struggle or something, then --”

“Angel cavalry. That helps.” When Dean speaks Cas can’t help but look at him. He only hopes his face doesn’t betray his guilty conscience. But when Dean is looking at him like that, with a grin that anticipates triumph, with eyes clear and unclouded by conflict, he knows that he will help them. Of course he will. He always does, or tries to.

No matter how very very much he does not want to do this.

Besides, it is the only way to keep Dean safe, and that has been his number one priority since the day he pulled him from the pit.

He nods once. “Very well.”

“Great. I’ll go get the cheese. Hey Sam -- you got a knife?”

~*~

It’s strange to watch over Sam and Dean with their express knowledge and permission. He’s always done it, but there has been a sense that it made them uncomfortable somehow. Possibly something to do with masculine pride; humans could be odd about that sort of thing. At any rate, this time is different. They both go to bed fully dressed, which is unusual. Castiel wonders if they feel safer that way -- going into battle armored, rather than vulnerable. They are, after all, still on the hunt, even if it will take place inside their sleeping minds. 

Dean washes his Stilton and crackers down with his last warm mouthful of beer before settling down on top of the blankets. “Alright,” he says. “Sleep tight, Sam. Sweet dreams.”

Sam glowers at his brother, but makes no comment other than to turn off the bedside lamp. The room is pitch black in its absence, silent except for a dull highway roar and the shifting of two men trying to get comfortable in bed while wearing jeans.

Sam doesn’t seem to have much trouble; within 15 minutes his breathing has shifted into the snuffling not-quite-snores of his first stage of sleep.

Dean, however, is wide awake.

Cas sits as still as a marble angel in a graveyard. Inside, he is a tumult. It has been years since he first saw himself in one of Dean’s dreams, and since then there have been so many. Castiel has looked on as they lounged on the hood of the Impala under the starlit Rocky Mountain skyline, and heard Dean ask if this could be his Heaven. He has been battered by winds and rain as he watched the two of them walk hand in hand, unstoppable, through the eye of a hurricane. He saw himself enjoying a soft-focus golden-lit picnic with Dean, Lisa, and Ben, and as the dream progressed Lisa and Ben had become blurrier and blurrier while he and Dean remained crystal clear. He has even stared with heated cheeks as they showered together, and even though they hadn’t so much as brushed elbows or exchanged words, the dream had left Castiel feeling prickling-hot and breathless and he could not meet Dean’s eye for half of the following day.

He guards these dreams fiercely, cherishing the closeness he feels with Dean within them. He craves that feeling -- yearns to share it with the Dean of the waking world. But as his attachment to those tender feelings grows, so too does the sense of wrongness creeping further and further into his bones, guilt coiling like a serpent in his stomach. Dean would not willingly share these things, these feelings; it’s possible he’s not even aware that he feels them. If he would -- if he were -- then why has he not in all this time ever expressed them outside of his dreams? What right does Castiel have to witness the hidden depths of his emotions? How often has Dean chastised him for such things as not watching people sleep -- it’s “creepy” -- and violations of personal space? This... this is so much worse. If he knew how deeply Castiel had delved beyond the boundaries of his privacy, Cas feels certain that he would lose everything.

And yet he does not want to stop. The thought of giving up his direct line into Dean’s heart, these opportunities to brush his grace against Dean’s soul, yields a choking, wretched feeling of loss. He cannot bear it.

“Cas?” Dean’s quiet voice breaks the silence. He sounds almost as nervous as Castiel feels.

“Yes, Dean?”

There is a longish pause, and then Dean just says “Nevermind,” and rolls onto his side.

Another long handful of moments listening to the brothers breathing, and then -- “Just. Whatever you see in there -- let’s not talk about it, okay?”

And there -- there it is. The denial. The shame. Dean would not want Castiel to know his heart the way he does. Cas chokes down the tide of guilt that rises within him, bites down on his tongue.

“Okay,” he says.

Thus mollified, Dean sighs deeply, relaxing into the mattress. Soon, his breathing too mellows and slows.

It’s almost second nature now -- reflex -- allowing himself to be drawn in by the sonorous rhythm of Dean’s breathing. It lulls Castiel into a kind of trance state. He tries so hard to keep himself from it, employing all the tricks he has seen the brothers utilize when fighting their own sleep deprivation: twitching and fidgeting, sitting up ruthlessly straight, pacing the length of the room. In the end, though, it is all absolutely useless.

He falls.

~*~

When Castiel opens his eyes, he is in a long dark hallway. He can see a red-curtained egress at one end; behind and all around him is shadowy darkness. From beyond the curtain he can hear low, pulsing music and voices. Laughter. Sighs.

Moans?

Oh.

_Oh._

He should turn back. He absolutely should not be here. The Dreamwalker is obviously not here, and if it were to attack Sam while Cas was busy spying on Dean’s most private unconscious non-thoughts, Dean would absolutely kill him. Literally. Without question.

But if he can... Castiel sends a line of thought back along the way he came, seeking out the other sleeping mind in the room. There. He can sense Sam’s dreamscape just a few feet away in physical space, can sense, even at this distance, the color and tenor of those dreams. Currently they are placid. Formless. Castiel feels certain that he could sense a change in that atmosphere and come to his aid at once if it were required. And since he can watch over both brothers just as well from where he is as he could in the physical world, then why not... just stay here?

 _Because you are an interloper and you are prying where you do not belong,_ a voice inside is wailing at him, the voice of his conscience that he has been trying to listen to more closely these days. But his curiosity is a fishhook between his eyes, and another feeling -- lower, more primal, a kind of urgent pulse below his belly, spurs him to recklessness. He has remained unobserved this far. What’s one final temptation?

Silently, he moves toward the red curtain.

There is a bed. It is round and enormous and covered in purple and red velvet throws. In the bed is Dean, of course, and he is entirely nude. Even the dream where they had shared a shower had not included this level of lurid detail. Castiel swallows a sudden mouthful of saliva, his heart pounding so hard he worries it might stop. This is _Dean._ His toned shoulders and arms, the wings of his shoulder blades, soft dip of his spine, his sloping thighs, his -- his gluteus maximus, all gleaming with a sheen of sweat in the candlelight. And he is... moving. There is someone beneath him but Castiel pays them no mind. He is mesmerized by the clench of Dean’s ass as he rolls his hips, captivated by the way the muscles in his arms bunch and his toes curl and flex. He hears Dean chuckle, low and filthy, and Castiel has to close his eyes. He feels as if his insides might simply melt away. Is this lust? Is this the sin that so many have fallen to? In that moment, Castiel, Angel of the Lord, _understands._

And then Dean moves his head.

And underneath him.

Is.

Castiel.

His own face -- borrowed, certainly, but the face he has come to recognize as his own, and more importantly the face that Dean knows as his -- is staring up at Dean from a mound of pillows, his lips glistening and open, enticing. He is just as nude as Dean and they are pressed tight, close together. Castiel can see his own knees knocked wide to make space for Dean’s body.

This must be what it feels like to go mad.

Cas watches for who knows how long as Dean’s lips glide over his skin, watches his own hands caress muscled shoulders and muss honey-colored hair and he feels blind, murderous _envy._ He wants to cut off his own fingers for daring to touch -- it is absurd. But true. This is the most horrible tease. He had not known, had not so clearly defined the shapeless desire that pinches his gut whenever he is near Dean or thinks of Dean. He’d called it a desire to be closer, to protect, to have his undivided attention. But now? Now that he sees this... this feast laid before him but not his to touch, he can’t fathom how he ever thought it was anything else. He wants. He wants Dean. Wants him deep down in the core of himself, wants to feel his racing heart and taste his panting breaths, wants this body that houses the sun-bright soul he knows so well to shake to pieces between his palms and let a little of that light loose into the world so that Castiel may lap it up with his tongue.

“Dean...” a quiet moan slips from his lips before he even knows it is there to be stopped.

Dean turns. Their eyes meet. Castiel has never been more aware of the stuffy heat of his trenchcoat and suit. He wants to rip it all off and feel skin, but that -- surely that is impossible.

Dean’s grin splits his face, showing white teeth. “Now that’s what I’m talking about,” he growls, abandons the already-nude dream-Cas on the bed, crosses to Castiel and fists both hands in the lapels of his coat. He pulls, and in his shock Cas can only follow, weak-limbed and starting to shake as his coat and suit jacket are pushed from his shoulders. He follows the tug and pressure of Dean’s hands -- one now gripping his tie -- until his toes hit the bed and they are falling, Dean beneath him. Oh God. Dean beneath him, caged in Castiel’s arms with his knees framing his hips as Cas kneels on the bed between them. Cas feels his skin prickle into gooseflesh from his ears to the backs of his thighs.

Then he feels Dean’s hands on his jaw and neck. He is being drawn closer, closer, until their noses brush and their lips are an electric hairsbreadth apart. Angel or no angel: in that moment Castiel feels dangerously human. He closes the distance, leans into the plush press of Dean’s lips, drinks in the moan from Dean’s throat. It is short, low, breathy, and exquisite.

For a moment, Castiel trembles with knowing the heat of Dean’s skin under his hands as he maps the shape of his body. He knows the slick, open glide of their mouths together, knows the fan of Dean’s breath on his cheeks, the sweet-human taste of his tongue. He could open his eyes and count his eyelashes if he wished. Dean’s hands skim his own arms, shoulders, back and waist over his shirt and Cas’s skin simmers in the wake of that touch. He curses his vessel’s layers of clothing. He needs that touch without barriers, needs contact. He needs to get as close as possible in this oh-so-human way, wants to feel his skin and Dean’s ignite against each other, wants to _burn --_

There are too many hands.

When he presses close to Dean’s chest there is a third set of hands roving between them. He pulls back -- Dean’s eyes are half-lidded and glittering as his head lolls to one side, and Cas sees himself, sees his own lips dragging wetness up the side of Dean’s neck. His own arms are wrapped around Dean from behind, hands gripping, kneading, touching, and Castiel feels nausea bloom out of the lusty heat rolling around in his gut. This is a dream. This is a dream, and not even one he can call his own. He startles backwards, tripping over his own feet in his haste to get away.

Yet another set of hands curls over his shoulder and down his arm, the intimacy cloying and wrong in the wake of his realization. He turns to see another of himself, blue eyes wide and hungry, staring past him at Dean, still gloriously nude on the bed. At his other shoulder then, a third iteration of himself, with a feral, toothy grin. They move forward to envelop Dean from all sides, mouths and hands on naked skin _everywhere._ This is wrong. This is so wrong. He should not be here, should never have seen this.

He forces his feet to move him backwards, slowly at first, then with greater haste as two, three, five more Castiels materialize and crawl into the bed, all of them murmuring Dean’s name, until it’s impossible to tell which limbs belong to whom in this obscene Gordian knot. Then Castiel turns and bolts blindly down the corridor into the dark.

~*~

Castiel opens his eyes with a gasp and he is back in the motel room, blood pounding and chest heaving. He squeezes his eyes shut against the needy heat still burning between his legs, presses a guilty palm to the firm ridge of flesh he finds there. Pleasure sparks from his touch and he has to force his hand away or he will disgrace himself.

In the dim room he raises his eyes to the sleeping brothers. Sam first. Sam has kicked the blankets off the bed, but is otherwise peaceful. Thank goodness. He keeps his eyes on Sam for a while, deliberately avoiding looking at Dean, though he can see his restless movements out of the corner of his eye. Tries to pretend his every sense is not acutely aware of Dean, every movement and every sound. He can hear him shifting, the sighs puffing out through his nose, harder than his usual sleep-breathing. Is he waking? Or in danger?

Cas can’t help it then, he looks -- and no, Dean is not awake, and not in danger. He is still dreaming, perhaps still caught in that same messy tangle of limbs and skin and mouths and hands. Dean’s hips are rocking, rutting in an unmistakable rhythm that rekindles the blaze of want in Castiel’s groin. Dean is aroused. Aroused by _him,_ albeit firmly in dreamland. Aroused enough to be shoving his hips hard against a pillow he’s maneuvered between his legs, panting in his sleep. Cas feels his palms tingle and the blood pulse harder in his prick and he clenches his fingers against the urgent need to reach out and touch -- Dean or himself, he’s not certain. Either. Both. The images and sensation of the dream are still fresh in his mind, the taste of Dean’s lips still lingering on Castiel’s mouth and the feel of his skin -- ALL of his skin, everywhere, glistening and soft and he wonders what unimaginable, dare he think it, _sexual_ things he is doing to Dean in his dream --

Cas slams his eyes shut against the spectacle of Dean, then looks back at Sam, desperate for any kind of distraction. Sam is good. Sam is safe. Sam is neutral. Sam is --

Sam is being attacked.

In half a heartbeat, Castiel is gone, diving headfirst into the hunt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just in case you weren't aware, here's the song Dean is singing to Cas: ["Karma Chameleon, by Culture Club"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmcA9LIIXWw)


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm accelerating my original posting schedule because I don't like waiting any more than the next person, soooo here's chapter 2! The rest will be up sometime this week, hopefully before Thursday. Enjoy!

.iii

“-- And then the reindeer all jumped out of the way because there was this THING, and it looked like a Chupacabra had a baby with a Wendigo, right? Really weird. Anyway it’s coming straight at me, and at first I don’t make the connection because, I’m dreaming, y’know?”

“Mmhmmm.”

“But then there’s this knife in my hand, and....”

Dean has long since tuned his brother out in favor of poking his breakfast and trying not to think. Frankly, he would much rather have been fighting a Wendigo-Chupacabra hybrid --Wendicabra? Chupadigo? -- than what he’d actually got out of the Killer Cheese adventure. Of all the nights to have a dream like... like _that._ And about _Cas._ It had been years since he had an honest-to-god wet dream (what is he, 14? He’d cleaned up more than his share of messes in hotel sheets at that age; he really doesn’t need to relive it now, in his 30s, thanks) and he had never had that sort of dream about Cas before. (Unless you count the one with the showering, which Dean doesn’t, except for how often it comes up in his idle daydreams.) It was bad enough when Cas was just... _there_ all the time. Even when he’s not actually a part of the dream (which is sort of rare these days) Dean still gets this sort of... Cas-is-here sense and it’s nice and it’s comforting, and the ones where he does show up are by far his favorite dreams -- not that he’ll admit that to anyone, ever. But even all that is way less incriminating than a goddamn orgy of Castiels. What the hell was in that cheese?

“-- And then Cas shows up and he goes all righteous angel glory on this thing, and let me tell you: pretty cool --”

He’s sitting _right there,_ too, across the table from Dean and Sam, and that’s not helping. Dean tries so hard to keep his eyes off him, worried about what the angel will be able to pick up, what he’ll read on Dean’s face. But then he has to sneak glances to try and figure out if he knows -- if he was there. But he wouldn’t have been. Sam had been the one attacked, not Dean, so he would have had no reason to go into Dean’s head -- right? This is just the paranoia talking.

But if he did see somehow... Dean feels all nervous and squirmy just thinking about it.

He would have known. Wouldn’t he? When Cas had come into his dream that one time to try and warn him about the angels, he’d known. But this time there were -- he swallows thickly -- several iterations of Castiel. What if... what if one of them had been...

Frantically he replays what he remembers of the dream -- probably not the best idea but he’s looking for something specific, any evidence that one of the Cas’s might have been different. He remembers taking one of their coats off. That was near the beginning, but there had also been a naked Cas before that... he thinks? Fuck it. Dreams are weird, and it’s all starting to become one big blur. A blur of tanned skin and broad, warm hands, pink-lipped mouths and a dozen deep voices all groaning his name...

Ok time to shut down that train of thought. Posthaste.

It’s not like he hasn’t thought about it. From time to time. Cas is an attractive guy. Dean is aware that he sometimes goes for guys -- a little. When he’s feeling adventurous and has a few whiskeys in him. Never in the same zip code as Sam though, and never with fewer than two states between him and his father before he’d died. Never with a guy he thought he’d have to see more than twice. Never with a hunter or anyone who could spread the word. That’s what makes this thing with Cas, whatever it is, so fucking dangerous. In a vacuum, sure, he’d be willing or even eager to fool around. But Cas is practically family. And that puts him so far into the realm of ‘off limits’ that he can’t even seriously entertain the fantasy.

Dean risks another glance at Cas, and for a split second their eyes catch. Dean’s not sure who looks away faster.

Fuck. He totally knows. _Fuck._

Okay. Okay. Panic starts to bubble up in Dean’s throat but he chokes it down with a swallow of coffee. He’d covered his own ass on this. Whatever you see in there, let’s not talk about it, he’d said. It’s a tenuous thread to hang his dignity on but maybe -- maybe Cas would respect that. Maybe if he just ignored it, pretended not to remember, Cas would follow his lead and they could just. Forget about it. It was just a stupid dream, anyway. It’s not like it meant anything.

Yeah. That sounds like a great plan. Forget all about it. Just eat your eggs, Dean Winchester, and try not to think so damn much.

~*~

Dean is quiet.

Castiel tries his hardest to act “natural” while still watching Dean carefully for any hint that he might know or suspect that Cas had been a trespasser in his subconscious last night. He looks -- nervous? He only sees it when their eyes catch briefly, and Cas looks away as quickly as he can while hopefully still reading as casual. Damn human facial intricacies. But there is an occasional blush to Dean’s cheeks; he can see Dean’s throat working. Is he remembering the dream? Re-living it now as he sits across from Castiel, sipping his coffee and picking at his eggs? The thought sends heat up Cas’s neck and down to his groin. Dean could be aroused right now, thinking about him, while sitting with their knees only inches apart under the table. He contemplates slouching down, trying to make contact. He could slide one of his own knees between Dean’s and --

This has to stop. This is going too far.

And yet.

What if Dean wants him -- like that? Really wants him? What if he could have the closeness he craves with him outside the confines of his dreams?

Traitorous thoughts. Hasn’t he invaded Dean’s privacy enough? How close is too close?

He is becoming alarmingly aware that when it comes to Dean, there is no such thing as too close.

The conversation, such as it is, lulls to a halt. Cas becomes aware of the silence over the table only when it has gone on too long, and he finally tears his gaze away from Dean’s fidgeting fingers to look up at Sam. Sam has both eyebrows raised, incredulous, though about what Cas doesn’t dare contemplate.

“Dudes,” he says.

Dean snaps into focus in time to look affronted. “What?”

Sam looks back and forth between Cas and Dean, like he’s waiting for the punchline of a joke that neither of them were aware they were telling. “Seriously?”

“What??” Dean spreads his hands, all indignant innocence.

Same just rolls his eyes and gets up, tosses some cash on the table and starts to leave. Dean does similarly and Cas has little choice but to follow.

They’re most of the way to the door when Dean turns back -- and almost runs straight into Cas’s chest. He pulls up short, his eyes so wide Cas can see a lot of the white. Cas swallows a curse. He hadn’t meant to follow so close.

“Uh.” Dean doesn’t move away at first. Just stands there, not quite gaping, his eyes flickering over Cas’s face, down to his collar and up to his lips. Cas doesn’t move away either, frozen between the urge to flee and the magnetic pull he feels toward Dean.

“M -- My jacket,” Dean mutters, pointing weakly.

“Of course,” Cas murmurs. He moves aside. Dean’s chest brushes his lapel as he sidles past in the narrow space between tables and Cas feels it as though the clothing between them were insubstantial, a mere conduit for electric sensation. He breathes in sharp and sudden and he can smell him: harsh bar soap, his deodorant, the musk of Dean, old denim and road dust and gun oil and _Dean._ Cas feels his knees go all watery and he has to close his eyes, clench his fists, or he’s going to do something truly embarrassing. Like lean in and bury his face in Dean’s neck so that he can drink in that scent from the source, grab at the collar of his shirts to anchor himself in that scent that equals _home, friend, companion. Dean._

Then Dean is past, taking his warmth and his intoxicating scent with him. Castiel shakes himself, resolutely does not look back, and bolts for the exit.

~*~

Some weeks later, a vampire nest shows its bloody hide outside Milwaukee. It’s a nasty one, deep and old, well-established, good at covering up their trail of disappearances and bodies. They only get wind of it when one of the newer initiates to the nest gets a little proud and revenge-happy and starts picking off the popular clique at her school. Once they realize just how many heads there are on this hydra, the brothers and Cas take a few deep breaths, crack their knuckles, and dive in.

Things do not go as planned.

_“Dean!”_

Castiel races through dark, blood-spattered hallways, his angel blade gripped in his fist and dripping viscera down his sleeve. There might be a spray of gore on his face. He hasn’t really been paying attention.

They have Dean.

Cas has lost track of how many vampires he has slain so far. He is entirely focused on finding Dean. Anything to put an end to the kaleidoscope of terrible possibilities that has been spinning through his mind for the last two days since they found his phone in an alley behind a bar.

He turns a corner. There is a door hanging open on one hinge; stairs behind it lead down to a basement level with rows of bloody hooks hanging from the beams. Meat locker. There is a scuffling noise from deeper in the darkness, a hoarse voice shouting “Get away from me you son of a bitch!” and Castiel has never been so relieved to hear profanity in his long, long life. He charges, blade at the ready, rounds a half-finished wall and confronts a mouth of sharp teeth, reddened eyes, animal snarls -- and in one unflinching swing severs the vampire’s head from its neck. There is a wet thump and a sickening splatter, but Castiel has already stepped past the body.

Dean is broken, but alive -- beaten but fighting. He is clearly only held up by the hook under the bindings at his wrists, rather than any strength of his own legs. Evidence of several feedings peppers his body: deep round lacerations at his neck, thighs, the crook of his arms, visible through rent and ragged clothing. His face -- a bruised and bloody mess, one eye swollen shut. And yet when he lifts his head, his good eye sparkles and he manages a toothy grin of his own.

“God _damn_ am I glad to see you,” he says. “Where’s your white horse, Cas?”

The relief is almost nauseating as it rolls over Cas like a breaker wave. His limbs feel leaden with it and he may drop his blade -- doesn’t matter -- but he moves forward to free Dean from his bindings. “I have never ridden such an animal,” he mutters as an afterthought.

“Yeah, but --” Dean gasps as Castiel lifts him bodily off the hook, lowering him to his knees. “You know -- knight in shining armor?”

Cas’s breath hitches behind his ribs. He might be close to tears, he thinks. This is his Dean, alive and in his arms, not exactly well but still _Dean_ which is more than he might have hoped for.

Summoning as much of his stolen grace as he can, Cas moves to cup Dean’s jaw in the palm of his hand, thumb grazing over a bruised cheekbone and fingers brushing the short hairs behind his ear. He closes his eyes, exhales breath and power, and when he opens them he sees _Dean,_ whole and hale, his eyes wide, clear, and blinking. Dean, with blood still smeared over his skin and clothing, but no longer struggling for breath, no longer listing and leaning to favor his many injuries. Dean, their faces barely two handsbreadths apart, the stubble on his jaw rough against Cas’s palm.

It would be so easy.

Dean is alive.

It would be _so easy._

Then Dean’s gaze flutters down to Castiel’s lips -- his breath catches and his head tilts just a fraction of a degree -- and that is all the permission Cas finds he needs.

He leans in to close the gap.

Cool lips, warm breath, the suggestion of heat inside. Cas pulls Dean into him, the hand on his face sliding back to cup the nape of his neck, his other hand gripping his shirt where it hangs in tatters.

For a few long seconds, Dean’s only response is a sharp, surprised gasp. He does not pull away, does not press forward, does not move. Just long enough for Cas’s insides to freeze hollow. He starts to pull back, but then Dean’s hands, still bound, jerk forward to clutch at his coat, pulling, not pushing, and Dean’s lips part just a fraction, enough to slide sweetly along Castiel’s. It’s enough. For the second time in five minutes, Cas feels almost sick with relief, and he lets his own lips part and the tip of his tongue slide over the seam of Dean’s lips. He feels Dean’s breath stuttering out over his cheek, and Dean opens to his request, his own tongue meeting Cas’s in a moment of desperate exploration. Cas cannot help the rough groan that tears from his throat as he surrenders to the urge to pry Dean’s mouth wide open with his own, to surge forward with his whole body, crushing Dean’s hands between their chests as Dean presses up to meet him --

Footsteps -- Sam’s heavy boots and long stride, running toward them.

Dean pulls back so abruptly that Cas falls forward with his lips still hanging stupidly open. Dean is wiping his lips on the backs of his still-bound hands, but it’s too late. Sam is already there, staring at them.

“Really guys? Now? Timing!” he says with a contorted grin. “We still got about a dozen runners to mop up. Dean -- you good?”

Dean clears his throat, looking back and forth between his brother and Castiel. There is a flush in his cheeks that Cas would like to attribute to their kiss. “Fine,” Dean growls, pushing himself to his feet. “Gimme a blade.”

Sam uses a pocket knife to sever the ropes at Dean’s wrists and passes him a spare machete. After a quick, silent conversation of raised eyebrows, nods, and brotherly pats on the shoulder, Sam seems convinced of Dean’s constitution and dashes off back toward the stairs.

Dean glances over one shoulder at where Cas is still kneeling, stunned and useless on the floor. He doesn’t even make eye contact, just clears his throat and pulls himself up straighter. “Uh. Thanks,” he says. “For the, um. Y’know.” He gestures to his face, then bites his lips and backtracks. “I mean, not the -- y’know -- I mean that was -- um.” He shakes himself then, settles the blade more firmly in his grip. “Let’s just go kill something,” he growls, and follows his brother.

Cas kneels there on the grimy basement floor for a long moment.

He’s honestly not sure what he expected.

He lurches to his feet, picks up his bloody blade, and goes after them.

~*~

Dean follows Sam and Cas into the motel room and slams the door -- hard. Somewhere between being rescued, being kissed (thoroughly, unexpectedly), getting caught by his brother, and chasing down and slaughtering a dozen vampires, whatever Dean had been feeling in that moment (relief? desire? panic? terror?) had hardened into stone-cold fury.

“How dare you?” he stabs a finger in Cas’s direction. The look on the angel’s face freezes. Victorious exhaustion melts into wide-eyed dread. “What the hell were you thinking?”

“Dean, I can explain --”

“No. Shut up.”

“Guys, I --” Sam blanches at the look on Dean’s face, but he raises both hands in a placating gesture. “I’m just gonna clean up and then go get some dinner, okay?”

“Yeah, sure.” Dean tosses him the keys to the Impala and Sam hurries into the bathroom to wash off the blood. 

Silence, full and heavy, brews between them. Like a storm about to break. Cas tries again. “Dean, I --”

“I said shut up.” Dean swipes a hand over his face. “What makes you think you can just -- just do that, Cas?”

Cas frowns, then shrugs. “I wanted it. And so did you.”

“Like hell I did.”

Cas squints at him. “But... you... responded. Favorably.”

“I’d just spent two days as a blood bag; I probably would have kissed Martha Stewart if she’d been the one to rescue me.” At this point Sam sidles out of the bathroom, all over six feet of him hunched and trying to make himself small as he scuttles for the door.

Cas shakes his head. “No.”

“Don’t try and tell me what I want! What the fuck do you know?” Dean is yelling now, full voice. “You can’t just go around taking advantage of people, Cas! There are consequences!”

Cas spreads his hands, brow furrowed. “So far the only consequence has been this argument.”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about! Cas, I don’t even swing that way!”

“So your only objection is my vessel’s gender?”

“In case you hadn’t noticed, that kind of matters to humans!”

“Not to you, Dean!

Dean’s expression draws in tight, dark and dangerous. “The fuck did you just say?”

Cas pushes right up nose to nose, eyes like ice and a voice that threatens thunder. “I’ve seen your soul, Dean. I rebuilt you out of ashes; I know you better than you know yourself. So if you won’t acknowledge it, then I will. You want this.”

Dean’s fists clench and for a moment Cas thinks Dean is going to punch him. Instead, he closes his eyes, hardens his jaw. “Look,” he says, quieter. “I know what you saw. That dream -- the Dreamwalker case. I know you were there. But --”

Cas takes a step back, turns away. “That’s not it.”

“-- But it was just a dream, Cas. It wasn’t -- Dreams don’t always mean what you -- I mean --”

Cas shakes his head. “You are still lying.”

“I am not!”

“You are lying to yourself! I have seen your dreams, Dean, so many times, I have seen how you feel and all I wanted was to --”

“You what?”

Cas blinks his eyes wide and angry flush pales to ash. “I. Uh...”

“What dreams? When?” Dean asks in a voice like iron.

“..... A lot of them. Regularly. Since...” Cas sags, defeated. “Since before the Apocalypse.”

The silence that falls between them is like the silence after a bomb goes off, where everything stops to take stock of its new reality.

“Shit,” Dean mutters, turning away and swiping a hand over his jaw. “You mean to tell me,” he says slowly, deathly quiet, “That you’ve been snooping around in my head -- for _years?_ ”

Cas nods tightly.

“Where the hell do you get off, man? What in hell made you think that that was okay?” Dean is not yelling anymore, and he won’t look in Cas’s direction. He just sounds... devastated. Betrayed.

“I didn’t mean --”

But Dean is shaking his head and grabbing his jacket. “No. I’m done. I need a drink.” When he leaves he slams the door behind him again, leaving Cas alone in the motel room.

Dean walks -- doesn’t run, walks -- in the direction of the dive bar at the end of the road, trying to ignore the churning in his gut, the choking in his throat. He can’t. He vents his adrenaline on a newspaper stand; it gives a few satisfying crunches under his boot, but then he has to double over against a building, elbows on his knees and head in his hands. His heart is hammering with panic, his whole body shaking. It’s too much. Cas knows -- not just the one dream but _all of them,_ he knows about _all of it._ He knows and Dean has nowhere left to hide.

Dean forces himself to stand straight, shrugs his jacket tight around his shoulders and keeps walking, hoping he can drink enough tonight that he doesn’t dream at all.

 

.iv

 

Morning comes cloudy and quiet. Cas is nowhere to be found. Dean feels like he’s going to be sick.

“Cas? You better pick up already, okay? Look you... you can’t just go AWOL on us like this. I -- look, just... call me back.” Dean’s phone boops softly as he ends the call, his sixth attempt, the second time he’s left a message. He stares at the blank screen for a few minutes, then shoves it back in his coat pocket.

Perfect. Just perfect. Dean looks around the parking lot for something he can kick, and settles on his baby’s tire.

Sam comes out of the motel room with his duffle, his backpack, and a worried knit in his brow. Dean can’t stand to look at it. “No word?” he asks.

Dean shakes his head.

Sam sets his duffle down and shifts from foot to foot. Any second now he’ll open his big mouth and try to talk about it and Dean just... can’t.

“Dean, what --”

“Don’t want to talk about it, Sammy.”

“But you --”

“Nope.”

But Sam is still just standing there, staring at him with that constipated look on his face and his stupid hair and his stupid worry. Dean sighs. “Look. It’s been a really long, really shitty week. I just wanna get back to the bunker.”

“What about Cas?” Sam says it quiet, like he’s afraid Dean will blow up at the mention of his name.

Dean doesn’t look at him. Just stares down at the keys in his hand, thumbing the teeth. “Cas is a big boy, he can take care of himself. He knows where to find us.” If he wants to.

Sam heaves a great big sigh, but he doesn’t push. For now. Instead he loads his stuff into the car and heads to the office to check them out.

Dean sucks in a breath, lets it out slow through his nose, and rubs at the headache over his eyebrow. He’d obviously succeeded in drinking himself to dreamlessness last night, for better and for worse. Now that he’s awake, sober, and calmed down, he can feel a tight ball of regret brewing in his stomach. Trying not to think about it is failing spectacularly. His brain keeps throwing up flashes in front of him, of Cas’s face inches away from him as he gave up part of himself to heal Dean’s injuries. The feeling of his hand on Dean’s cheek, threading up into his hair. His lips -- he tries to shut that one down, digging fingernails into his palm, but he can’t lock it out entirely. He knows what his mouth feels like now, what Cas’s hands feel like on his body, and he is going to have one bitch of a time keeping that out of his thoughts the next time he’s taking a personal moment. And then the hurt and confusion in his face as Dean, in full offensive panic mode, had shouted him down.

The worst part is, Cas was right. He’s lying to himself, and he knows it.

Dean scrubs a hand over his face and crosses his arms, leaning against the car. It’s probably too much to hope that this whole thing will just blow over and be forgotten, but he can dream.

As it were.

“Cas?” He’s whispering the prayer before he really realizes it. “You uh... you got your ears on? ... Look. I. I overreacted, I know that much. Maybe we can.... I dunno, just... forget about this? I still.” Swallows. Twice. “You’re still family, alright? Just. Come back. We’ll work it out. Okay?” Silence. Of course. This is a one-way line of communication. Dean sighs and pushes off the car. “Good talk,” he huffs, then opens the door and slides into what comfort he can find behind the wheel of the Impala.

~*~

Greyhound buses, Cas has learned, do not get more comfortable the longer you spend riding them. Late in the morning after catching a midnight bus out of Milwaukee, he turns his phone back on and endures the flurry of missed calls, voice mails, and text messages that indicates the Winchester brothers trying to get your attention. Three texts from Sam, but the rest -- six missed calls, two voice mails, and five text messages -- are from Dean.

Cas takes a deep breath. Dean. When he lets himself touch the name in his mind, it releases a tidal wave of mixed emotions: guilt, anger, regret. A painful twinge of longing, forlorn but still stubbornly present. Sulky satisfaction that even after the events of last night Dean has tried so hard to get in touch. He had felt Dean’s prayer, heard his plea to just forget all about it. But that is not what Castiel wants. He’s not sure if it would be possible for him to go back right now, knowing what it’s like to kiss and be kissed but with the bitter tang of rejection lingering. Having briefly been certain that he was wanted, and then so thoroughly refused. The thought fills him with a devastated anger.

But... what if Dean was right: that dreams do not always mean what you think they mean? What if he had misinterpreted the workings of the sleeping human mind, things he shouldn’t have seen in the first place, and none of what he’d seen and felt meant what he wanted it to? Or what if there had been a chance, once, but now Dean would want no part of him except his camaraderie and partnership, and he should feel lucky for that much? Could he handle simply being a friend? He’d once thought that would be more than enough.

Cas wraps his arms tight around the hollow feeling spreading out from his core. It aches like starvation and nausea at once. He curls his body against the bus window and shuts his eyes. Maybe if he pretends he’s asleep, all of this will merely have been his own bad dream.

~*~

They’re three hours into the drive back to Lebanon -- so far silent except for Bad Company on the tape deck -- when Sam’s phone dings. He digs it out. Dean tries to pretend he’s not watching the screen when he flicks it on. “It’s Cas,” Sam says, then reads. “He’s on a bus.”

“What? Where to?” Dean is digging his own phone out of his jeans with half an eye still on the road, wondering if he missed something -- but no, his phone is blank.

“Didn’t say,” Sam shakes his head, tapping out a reply.

“Well tell him to get off that bus and turn his ass around,” Dean barks, unaccountably annoyed that Cas chose to get in touch with Sam rather than him. He can’t actually blame the guy, but it still stings. He’d prayed to the bastard, dammit.

Sam says nothing, just keeps typing. He’s typing for what seems like a very long time. Dean keeps glancing at him. Yep, still typing. That can’t be anything good. “What? What are you saying?”

“Nothing. I’m just telling him he should call you.” Sam sounds far too innocent.

Fucking Sam and his meddling good intentions. “You need to write a freaking novel to say that?” Dean grumbles.

Sam just gives him a bitchface back. And not even a good bitchface. Like, B- at best.

Paul Rogers’s voice reigns again for a few minutes before Sam’s phone dings in reply. He looks at it, sighs, and puts his phone back in his pocket. Dean tries to pretend he’s not burning up with curiosity.

“Dean...” Sam starts, and oh boy, they’re gonna Talk About It, aren’t they? Dean is uncomfortably aware of how few escape routes he has in the car. “Look, I know you don’t want to talk about it, but --”

“You’re right, I don’t.” Dean feels bad about the words as soon as they’re out of his mouth.

“But,” Sam barrels on, clearly determined, “I just want to say that whatever is going on between you and Cas, it’s fine. I won’t freak out.”

Yeah, that makes one of us, Dean thinks. “There’s nothing going on,” he grouses, but Sam isn’t finished.

“I’m just saying don’t feel like you have to hide anything from me, please. I know Dad had his whole macho thing, but I’m not like that, okay? Whatever you want, whatever makes you happy, I’m behind you 100%.” Dean just chews on his lip a little, staring at the corn fields all around them. “I mean, it kinda makes sense, you know? Profound bond and all that jazz?” He can tell Sam is smiling, trying to lighten things up a little.

Dean takes in a deep breath, and is surprised to find that it comes easier than any breath he’s taken in weeks. He still doesn’t know what’s going to happen with Cas, or even really what he wants to happen, but knowing that he can loosen his reins on this with his brother... it’s... a weight off his chest that he’s been carrying for so long he hadn’t even realized it was there. He feels so light he almost laughs, which at least is better than the alternative which is a burn of tears across the bridge of his nose.

“Thanks, Sam,” he says to the corn fields.

~*~

Cas switches buses in St Louis. He buys a ticket for the next bus that’s leaving that doesn’t stop in Kansas.

While waiting, he finally listens to Dean’s voicemails. The first one is a brief order to call him back. The second is a more involved and guilt-inducing version of the same. He knows he should tell them that he hasn’t been taken hostage, at least, but the idea of calling Dean, talking to him with this, this _thing_ between them... No. He can’t.

Instead he opens Sam’s texts.

S: [Hey man, what happened last night?]

S: [We’re leaving for Lebanon. Where are you?]

And then:

S: [If you can’t talk to Dean, talk to me, okay?]

Cas sighs, then opens a response.

C: [I’m fine. I’m on a bus.]

He deliberately avoids answering the first question.

A reply comes in a few minutes later.

S: [Glad you’re ok. Dean’s being pretty cagey. Want to fill me in?]

Cas worries his lip and stares for a moment into the passing crowd of travelers.

C: [Not really.]

S: [Well, whatever it was, not talking about it isn’t going to do either of you any good. Seriously. If you don’t feel like you can come to the bunker, at least call him. We’ll be back in a couple of hours.] And then, a follow-up text. [I know my brother is an idiot but he’ll calm down. Trust me.]

Cas sighs. He knows Sam means well. He may even be right. But at the moment, Cas cannot find it in himself to have that much faith. He stabs out a reply: [I’ll think about it.]

~*~

Dean opens his eyes in the shadowy gloom of Purgatory.

Cas is not here. He feels it like a hole in his guts, like a lead weight dragging him down by the neck. Sick panicky worry rises up within him, all around him, so he runs. He has to find Cas.

It’s not just that he’s not there, it’s that he’s _gone._ And more than just the panic, Dean feels the nauseating clutch of loss.

He searches for hours, running through the twisted trees full of glowing slitted eyes. He doesn’t find Cas. But he does find feathers -- broken glossy black feathers, first a few and then more until they are falling like snow, drifting under his feet, brushing his face, slipping through his fingers.

He still doesn’t find Cas.

He finds Benny.

Benny, kneeling with his head bowed down at ground zero, the epicenter of a blast zone where the feathers are thickest, building up in berms and snowdrifts. When he looks up at Dean, his expression is one of inconsolable grief. “Oh Dean,” he moans. “Did you forget?”

Then suddenly Benny is right there, chest to chest with Dean, staring hard into his eyes. “Did you forget what we could’ve had? All the things we never said? C’mon, brother. Why would you go and do that to him too?”

Dean opens his mouth, but apparently his only reply is to pull Benny into a kiss, hard and thorough -- to be kissed, held tight to Benny’s broad chest, dwarfed in his arms, and all the while sobbing into him because Cas is _gone_ \--

 

Dean startles awake in the dark of his own bedroom at the bunker, cold sweat on his back. Suddenly uncertain if he will be able to contain the contents of his stomach, he stumbles out of bed and into the tiny en suite water closet. The harsh light stabs his eyeballs when he turns it on, so he hides his face in his hands for a long time, leaning his elbows on the sink.

Once he is fairly certain that the danger of vomiting has passed, Dean slowly opens his fingers to let his eyes adjust to the light. Reaches blindly for the faucet and splashes cold water over his face.

Benny. He’d almost forgotten. Funny thing about spending time in other realms: after some time back on Terra Firma, it doesn’t quite feel real. Oh sure, at first it feels more real than the real world, but that’s just the adjustment period. It’s almost as if the human brain isn’t meant to cross boundaries like that. Go figure. Anyway, he and Benny had never actually done anything -- never been safe enough for long enough, and if he’s honest with himself he’d been too focused on finding Cas -- but he’d wanted to. And he’d been pretty sure Benny had wanted to, too. That was the closest he’d ever come to what he’s dealing with now.

And what exactly are you dealing with now, Winchester? He forces himself to meet his own eyes in the mirror. No time like the middle of the night to cut through the bullshit.

Ok. So. Feelings. For Castiel. What feelings? Trust. Camaraderie. Protectiveness, no matter how stupid that is for an eons-old celestial being who could throw him through a brick wall. Attraction. That one is hard to admit to but if he’s going for full frontal honesty here, he can’t deny it. Affection, especially for his deadpan humor that some people just don’t get, or that tilty-head thing he does, or the way he cares so much about Claire, or the way he still refuses to get rid of that trenchcoat and tie look and Dean kinda secretly loves it. Or... pretty much everything about him. Just... glad to be around him... ness. Is there a word for that?

He’s pretty sure there is but he’s not sure he can go there yet.

Except now he’s got more feelings like betrayal of trust and invasion of his privacy but... now that he’s gotten over the initial panic of exposure, it doesn’t bother him as much as he feels like it should. Dean’s life has always been one long string of weird. Having an angel snooping around in his dreams was pretty par for the course. Maybe that shouldn’t be his yardstick, but, well, there it is. Of all the messed up crap that’s happened to him, this is pretty benign. 

Why had he done it, though? What was there in Dean’s dreams that was worth snooping around in? Was he just... curious? Did he just get bored watching them sleep all night and this was how he kept himself occupied? Dean wonders for a moment if Cas had ever spent much time in Sam’s dreams, and finds that he has to deliberately unclench his fist. Huh. That was... weird. Was he actually _jealous?_ Okay. That probably says something fucked up about him. He hadn’t wanted Cas in his dreams in the first place but now that he knows he was there, he’d better not be in anyone else’s dreams?

He hadn’t been in that last dream, that was for certain. Dean wonders with a sinking feeling if all of his dreams would feel like that now: empty, hollow, like they were missing something vital. Maybe he had subconsciously registered Cas’s presence all this time and gotten used to it; maybe he’d liked it without even knowing he was there. He thinks about all the dreams he’d had where Cas was around, and yeah, okay, he had liked it. Cas must have liked whatever he saw in there too, because after years of watching Dean dream about him -- after the Killer Cheese incident (because yeah, he’d definitely been there, and that’s an idea that Dean is going to have to tread very carefully around because that means that he might have already -- anyway) apparently his take-home message had been that kissing Dean was something he wanted to do, and that Dean would be into that. And he’s not wrong. He’s... really not wrong. Dean just has to figure out how to face that fact, own up to it. He can do that. He really can.

If it isn’t too late. Because now Cas is gone.

Dean wonders if he’s scared Cas off for good, and even though that possibility makes his stomach clench, he can’t deny he would have earned it. Cas had taken a huge gamble with that heat-of-the-moment kiss based on some pretty good insider intel, and had got the fucking riot act read to him for his courage. It would serve Dean right if he just... never came back. And then his dreams wouldn’t be the only things that felt empty and hollow.

Dean feels approximately two inches tall in that moment, his stomach in his toes. With all the clarity of three in the morning, he knows precisely what an idiot he has been. “I screwed up, huh?” he asks his reflection.

He nods back at himself, then hides his face in his hands again.

Fuck this. He has to try and fix it, obviously, because he is a Winchester, and that’s what Winchesters do. No matter how hopeless. He pushes off the sink, dries his hands and his face, and turns on the light in his bedroom. With barely a sideways glance at his bed he sits down at his laptop, opens up a new search window, and starts digging into whatever he can find on lucid dreaming.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the final real chapter! The last is a brief coda.

.v

 

By the time Sam wanders through at a more reasonable hour of the morning, Dean has relocated to the library and is on his third cup of coffee. Sam halts, blinks at the lore books, notes, and open laptop. “Got a case?” he guesses.

Dean shakes his head. “Not exactly.”

Sam just stands and watches him for a moment, clearly waiting for Dean to explain. Maybe it’s the fact that Dean’s going on approximately three and a half hours of sleep. Maybe it’s the aftermath of the conversation the day before. Maybe it’s the stupid terrible dream he’d had. Whatever the reason, when Dean opens his mouth, it all comes tumbling out.

“Listen, you weren’t wrong,” he says. “About me and Cas. There’s nothing going on, but...” he sucks in a deep, steeling breath, clenching his fingers over his laptop keys. “But I kinda want there to be.” There. It’s out. Now he can get on with it. Sam sits down slowly at the table across from him. “Long story short, he’s been... I dunno, visiting, I guess, in my dreams. For a long time. And that got out the other night while I was biting his head off, and I didn’t take it too well, and now....” Dean shakes his head. “He won’t answer the phone, I’ve tried praying to him, we’ve got no idea where he is or where he’s going, so...” He shoves one of the books in Sam’s direction. He picks it up and inspects a highlighted paragraph.

“Lucid dreaming,” he says. “You think this might be a good way to talk to him?” For a guy who hasn’t even had his coffee yet, Sam is taking this very well in stride. Dean’s chest loosens up a little more, and he nods, a smile touching his lips.

“If I can figure out a way to draw him in, yeah. I don’t think he’s gonna come a’knockin on his own any time soon.”

Sam nods, taking in a deep breath and pressing his hands flat to the table. “Okay,” he says. “What’ve we got?”

~*~

Castiel doesn’t need to sleep. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t occasionally do so, especially as his stolen grace falters and he wavers ever-closer to humanity again. When he feels his head start to nod with the rocking motions of the quiet bus, lulled by the hum of the engine and the road under the tires, he pulls his spine straight and tries to blink his eyes wider. He looks around -- there are not many fellow passengers, and almost all of them are sleeping. One little girl is curled up under her father’s arm. A woman and her husband both have their heads leaned back, mouths dropped open, snoring faintly. A young man in ragged black is leaning sideways with his hoodie balled up under his head.

That looks halfway comfortable.

Cas wiggles and shifts until he can remove his trenchcoat, then wads it into a ball and tucks it into the space between his shoulder, his ear, and the bus window. It takes some doing, but eventually he gets into a position where he can relax. His eyes close. His breathing evens.

It doesn’t occur to him that this might be a bad idea until he has one foot over the precipice into slumber. By then it is too late.

~*~

“You sure this is gonna work?”

“Only one way to find out. Worked last time, didn’t it?”

“Yeah but last time he was in the room with you.”

“That’s what this is for.” Dean holds up the bronze bowl full of the ingredients for the modified summoning spell they’d found. “Worst case scenario, I eat a bunch of cheese and go to bed. As far as worst cases go, it ain’t bad.” He eyes the large block of Stilton on the plate in front of him and wishes he had something better to eat it with than stale Saltines. They need a grocery run.

“Well,” he sighs. “Bottoms up.”

~*~

The dream that Cas falls into... it cannot be his own. Even when he has slept, he has never dreamed.

The first thing he sees is lights -- blue and green beams of light that swirl through misted air. They make patterns, flash painfully bright when they swoop over Castiel’s eyes, spin and strobe and cut sharp lines in the fog. What they do not do is illuminate, at least not very well. In the murky shadows between the beams of light, Cas can see the vague shapes of people, a crowd all dressed in black. As Castiel watches them moving, dancing, he becomes aware of the music: little threads of melody over a syncopated beat that pulses through the air, the floor, vibrates Castiel’s bones and entices him to move. He resists -- for now -- content to observe. He scans the crowd, looking for something -- someone.

There.

Dean is dancing in the one stationary point of light in the whole place, at the center of a swirling mirror ball of silver specks. Though Castiel knows that this is not his usual scene, not the sort of music he would ever choose, here in this dreamscape he is lost to it, abandoning machismo and reputation to unabashed, shameless movement. His clothes are clinging black from neck to toe, his arms bare and sparkling. Pink, wet-shining lips hang open in blissful invitation.

The crowd between them parts like water, for which Cas is grateful. When he is standing almost close enough to touch, Dean looks him suddenly square in the eye. “Hey Cas,” he says, his tone completely conversational. “Guess we found the head of the pin, huh?” And with a grin, he turns, encompassed by the rhythm once more.

Before Cas knows exactly what’s happening his hands are reaching out to frame Dean’s hips, to feel his gyrations in the palms of his own hands. As soon as his fingers make contact with warm black denim, the shockwave ripples through him down his arms. It’s as if he is suddenly plugged in directly to the primal, grinding beat. He is pulled into Dean’s rhythm, flush to his back, one long and sinuous line of contact. From this distance he can see the sweat beading on Dean’s neck, feel it through their two thin shirts, damp, hot, and sliding. He can _smell him,_ that same denim and musk smell from when they’d brushed in the diner, but now he is closer, his nose pressed flush to the slope from neck to shoulder. Cas inhales, drinks in _Dean,_ and his fingers clutch tighter of their own accord, his hips pushing forward into the solidity of Dean’s body. His mouth opens dry and tingling against Dean’s skin; he drags his lips and nose over that spot and feels his own breath bloom, steamy and warm. The skin under his lips prickles and Dean shivers. He reaches back to touch him then, blunt-tipped fingers in Castiel’s hair and a firm grip at his wrist to pull his hand forward to Dean’s belly. Cas’s eyes open wide, unfocused. All he can see is skin and the glittering dark beyond, but he _feels_ \-- Dean is effectively touching his own body with Castiel’s hand, his fingers gripping Cas’s wrist and roving it over his flat stomach, his chest, first over the shirt and then underneath.

Cas groans harsh and grating against Dean’s neck as his hand skims over skin. His palm catches and stutters on sweat-stickiness. He digs in with his fingertips, scrapes with his nails -- _mine, mine, mine, mine,_ he chants in his head -- and a shudder wracks Dean’s body wholly separate from the incessant beat that has swallowed them whole. Cas feels Dean’s hand release his wrist and trail lower, lower --

Oh. Dean is touching himself. _There._

Cas’s arms tighten reflexively around Dean as lust spears through him. Both his hands now are roving Dean’s chest, his waist, one finger catching a nipple. Then Dean is pulling away, but only far enough to turn in Castiel’s embrace and suddenly it is so, so much worse. Or better? Dean’s pupils are blown wide with lust, cheeks flushed and shining, lips hanging open. He can almost taste Dean’s mouth already, and when he presses their bodies close, chest to chest, hip to hip, he can feel -- fuck --

He’d had no idea, _no idea_ that it would feel this good to press his erection against Dean’s. The sensation shocks through his whole body and he pushes, pushes, _pushes_ against his hardness, and Dean is pushing right back, panting harsh in his ear. He feels galvanized, magnetized, and Dean -- Dean is his lodestone. Dean’s hands make a mess of Cas’s hair, smooth over his shoulders and down the curve of his waist to pull him closer, one hand dipping further to dig into his asscheeks as he rolls their hips together. It all leaves Cas a shivering, shuddering mess.

And then their lips meet.

It’s like a circuit completed, two live wires brought to touch. Dean moans into Cas’s mouth, desperate, rough, and Cas dips his tongue deeper to chase the sound. They aren’t dancing anymore, not really. Their grinding movements have been given over entirely to pleasure.

Cas isn’t quite sure when their clothing starts to melt away, but by the time he bothers to pull back, both of them are bare and open to each other. The darkness around them has melted too, from blackness pierced with light to a dull blood-red glow, and their fellow dancers -- well. There is not a stitch of clothing left in the place, and lush moans echo under the music. Cas steps back to look his fill at Dean, all of him; he runs his fingertips over softly muscled arms, chest, stomach, reaches around to grip Dean’s plush, bare ass in both hands.

“Oh -- fuck, yeah -- Cas. Please.” Without a thought, Dean wraps his legs -- both of them -- around Cas’s waist. Holding him up is effortless, as is reaching his fingertips down further into the warm channel between Dean’s cheeks, further, to brush the heat of Dean’s hole. At the touch, Dean’s whole body jerks and he clutches harder at Castiel, a needy whine forced from his throat. Cas feels Dean’s cock slicking against his belly with his restless writhing. He pants his desperation hot against Dean’s collarbone.

“Please,” Dean whispers, begs, “God Cas -- I want you --”

“Dean,” a low growl escapes into the hollow of Dean’s throat before he sinks his teeth in there. _“Dean...”_ he leans Dean against nothing, grips his wrists tight in both hands and raises them to hold his wrists against -- nothing -- then nudges purposefully with his hips, searching in that hot cleft for the place where he can push and press and _enter_ the tight heat of him and --

This is a dream.

The reality hits him like a bucket of ice water and twice as dousing. Just as he is rutting his aching cock against the cleft of Dean’s ass, feels that miraculously slick entrance, ready for him --

This is _Dean’s dream._ He cannot do this.

It takes a wrenching effort of will, like tearing off his own skin, but Castiel removes his hands from Dean’s body. Pushes his legs back to down to the ground. He has to clench his eyes closed against Dean’s questioning noises, the flash of hurt and confusion over his face -- not real, not real, none of this is real, this is a _violation_ \-- just as surely as he ignores the obscene bob of his own naked prick as he turns away. All around him in the dim red dreamlight, the press of bodies and accusing gazes tries to herd him back to Dean, but he shoves them aside. He has to get out of here. He has to find the way out of this nightmare.

_“WAIT!”_

Dean’s sharp cry is different this time. It shatters the air, and the dream changes. All at once, Cas is standing on a ribbon of black road cutting through a wide field, endless horizon and featureless gray sky stretching in all directions.

Footsteps -- running footsteps, and then Dean grasps his elbow to turn him. They are both clothed again and Dean is staring at him with an entirely different kind of desperation.

“Cas, it’s me! It’s really me and I know it’s really you, okay? I mean obviously it’s me, it’s my dream, but I KNOW I’m dreaming and --”

“Dean.”

“Right. Sorry. Babbling. Look.” Dean blinks hard and squeezes Cas’s biceps in both hands. “Come back. Okay? Please. I want this -- I want this to work. I want to try. Please. Come back.”

“Dean, I don’t --” Cas averts his eyes, tries to pull away from Dean’s grip and fails. “I shouldn’t be here.”

“I invited you! I had a dream without you and it SUCKED, okay?” Dean removes one hand from Cas’s arm to swipe over own his mouth, then cups Cas’s cheek in his palm. “Look, I don’t want to do this here. I’m going to contact you when we both wake up and I want you to -- please. Listen to me there. We can do this.”

Cas scowls, unwilling to cater to the traitorous flicker of hope inside him. “What you are saying now has no bearing on waking reality. You’re likely to not even remember this conversation.”

“Just trust me, Cas. Please?” Then Dean slides his other hand up Castiel’s arm and uses both hands to pull him in. Castiel’s breath hitches when their foreheads touch, noses brushing. “Please, Cas. I want this. Please.”

Before Cas has a chance to respond, a wind picks up from the east and the field, the road, the sky, begin to disintegrate around them. “No -- No, wait!” Cas grabs for Dean’s shirt, but he cannot stop Dean from dissolving into dust from the ground up. He keeps staring into Cas’s eyes until the very last moment, whispering over and over again, “Please... please...”

And then, after an indeterminable moment floating in the ether, Castiel jerks awake on a Greyhound bus somewhere west of Denver. 

~*~

_“Fuck.”_

Dean swings his feet off the side of his bed and gropes in the darkness for his phone. He has to ignore the aching of his prick, because he has a very important text to send and he cannot afford to get distracted. The phone’s glare is harsh and he squints to tap out a single word and send it before he can think too hard about it.

[Please.]

He sits and stares at the screen until it goes dark, trying to take deep breaths and calm the racing of his heart. Please was a good place to start, right? When you’re begging for forgiveness for being a total ass? When you’re trying to communicate across not-quite-standard methods with someone who may or may not even be capable of listening? If he was right, if he’d succeeded, then that was the real Cas and he would know. He’d get it. If that was just his overactive subconscious... well, he might look a little pathetic, begging Cas to get in touch with him at a quarter past the witching hour, but at this point he was willing to risk that. 

The ringing of the phone in his hand startles him so badly that he drops it. He sees Castiel’s name when he picks it up. One deep breath -- his heart is doing an energetic samba in his chest but he swallows it down -- and he punches the receive button. “Hey, Cas.” He tries for casual, but --

“Tell me you remember.”

Cas’s voice is rough, not just strained but sleep-rough. Dean exhales and feels his shoulders droop as some of the tension releases from them. “Yeah. Yeah, that was me.”

Cas breathes in a huge sigh that crackles in Dean’s ear when he lets it out. “Dean, I --”

“Where are you?” Dean does not want to have this conversation over the phone. Or maybe it’s that he doesn’t want to have it right now, in the wee hours of the morning still reeling and aching from that -- that dream. Fucking Stilton, apparently. Shit.

“Uhh -- about an hour west of Denver. On a bus.”

Dean traces his mental map of the continent, trying to figure out what route he’s probably on, what cities or towns he might be close to. Sudden curiosity tugs at Dean and he he asks: “Where the hell were you going, anyway?”

He can almost hear Cas’s shrug. “Not sure. California, perhaps?”

Dean’s brain supplies a snatch of a song, acoustic and sweet, about goin’ to California with an achin’ in my heart, and a surge of longing affection wells up in him for the angel on the other end of the line. “I wish you still had your wings,” he says suddenly. “That would make this a lot quicker.”

“So do I,” Cas murmurs, and there they are, right back on the edge of that conversation that Dean really, _really_ wants to have in person.

“Okay,” he says, “get off the bus as soon as you can and get one back to Denver. I’ll meet you there.” He’s already reaching for the lamp, blinking in the sudden illumination, and rooting around for a clean T-shirt and jeans.

“Are you leaving now?” Cas asks.

“Yes, now. ASAP.” He wonders if getting a motel room would be too presumptuous, or...

“Dean, how much sleep have you had?”

The question gives him pause and he spares a glance for the clock. 3:56. He’s got just under four and a half hours under his belt. “Enough,” he says. “I’ve driven longer on less for stupider reasons.”

Thankfully, rather than try to argue Dean back into bed, Cas just sighs. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll see you in Denver.”

“Okay.” Dean can’t help the little grin that tics up his lips. “See you there.” They ring off in typical Winchester fashion -- no words of goodbye.

 

.vi

 

C: [I can’t get off the bus until Grand Junction.]

D: [Yeah, I thought as much. Not much in the way of cities west of Denver.]

C: [I’ll be there as soon as I can.]

D: [No worries, I’ll get us a room.]

D: [That came out wrong. I just want us to have a place to talk in private.]

C: [You might also want to get some more sleep.]

C: [Because from what I understand, four hours isn’t actually sufficient for most people.]

D: [Yeah well. I’m not most people.]

C: [I’ve noticed.]

D: [Hitting the road now. I’ll text when I’m there.]

~*~

C: [Leaving Grand Junction. Be back to Denver in a few hours.]

D: [Great. I’m at the Banks Inn. Room 114.]

~*~

If the Banks Inn seems somewhat more upscale than Dean’s usual accommodations, Cas tries not to read too much into it. He knocks on the door to room 114 with his heart beating in his throat. It opens quicker than he’d anticipated and there is Dean, looking all over nervous with eyes wide, scrubbing his palms over his jeans. “Hey,” he says with half a grin.

“Hello, Dean.” Cas isn’t quite sure what his face does, but he hopes it’s a smile.

Once he’s inside, silence reigns for too many seconds. There are so many warring feelings inside Castiel that he finds it difficult to breathe, let alone assemble them together into some kind of coherent communication.

The silence breaks with an:  
“I’m sorr-”  
“Dean, I’m s--”

From both of them simultaneously. Dean breaks into a grin, his shoulders relaxing a little. “Me first.”

“No, Dean, my transgression is older.”

“Yeah but I was the bigger asshole. Let me.” Cas just looks at him as he puts on a serious face again and stands up straight. “I’m sorry,” he starts again. “I overreacted to -- all of that. The whole situation in Milwaukee. You caught me off guard, but you didn’t deserve that.”

“I’m sorry too,” Cas says. “I shouldn’t have just --”

“No, I’m glad you did. Really.” Dean moves to lean his hip against the dresser, which, intentionally or otherwise, puts him a step or two nearer to Castiel. “I know for damn sure I would never have taken the first step, so -- good on you for taking initiative.” 

Cas feels wingbeats inside of him, the flutters of hope gaining loft. “You -- But you --” Cas swallows. “You said it yourself. Dreams don’t always mean what they seem to mean on the surface.” He clenches his jaw and his fist. “And I shouldn’t ever have seen so many of yours in the first place. I invaded your privacy, and I’m sorry.”

Dean reaches up to rub the back of his neck. “I mean... yeah, okay, that probably wasn’t the best way to go about this, but it wasn’t the worst either.” Dean drops his hand and shrugs. “It should probably bother me more than it does, but -- when it comes right down to it, I don’t actually mind.”

Cas blinks, squints, tilts his head to the side. “You... don’t mind?”

Dean shrugs again, and -- is he blushing? Yes. Cas can make out a pink stain on his cheekbones. “Yeah, no, not exactly. It turns out I kinda like having you there, actually.” He sighs, as if whatever he’s going to say next is going to cost him something. “I think I knew you were there, honestly. Even before I started actually dreaming, y’know, about you -- not like that, that was just a few -- uh -- anyway,” he clears his throat and tries again. “I would get this sense, y’know? This sort of... Cas is here somewhere sense, and... I dunno, I liked it.” He shrugs, and his blush is definitely deepening. “It felt... Nice. It felt... y’know. Like you were always supposed to be there.” He looks up through his eyelashes at Cas, like he’s not sure if he’s said the right thing or the wrong thing.

Cas exhales a burden of guilt that has been accumulating for years. He takes a step closer to Dean. “I’m still sorry it went on so long without your knowledge.”

Dean huffs, grinning. “Yeah, if you’d just told me what you were up to we might have been able to get here quicker, and with fewer fireworks.”

Cas allows himself a laugh too, and they both seem to have run out of things to apologize for. For the moment, at least.

“What did you see in there anyway?” Dean asks after a moment, genuine curiosity open on his face.

Cas thinks for a long moment. He has seen so much of Dean and he cherishes every part. How to condense all that, to explain it? “Your soul,” he says finally, then smiles softly. “Nothing I hadn’t seen before.”

Dean laughs again, softly, looking down so that Cas can see his eyelashes brush his cheeks. Cas feels an urgency, a kind of nervous tingle in his belly and fingertips. He wants to kiss those eyelashes, those cheekbones. He wants to draw Dean close until they are both breathless.

“So... what now?” he asks, hoping he can guess the answer.

Dean sucks in a deep breath and looks away. “I --” he starts. “I’m not good at this,” he says, his voice edging toward anguished. “I always end up fucking it up somehow, and you mean a lot to me already and -- I’ve never -- I mean. With a guy, y’know? I’ve done -- I mean I’ve fooled around but I’ve never....” He trails off, then sucks in a breath and squares his shoulders against the truth. “I’ve never tried to have a relationship with a guy and it scares me, especially when even my relationships with women haven’t gone all that great.” He spreads his hands and gives Cas a woeful, helpless look.

Cas purses his lips for a moment. “If it helps, angels don’t truly have a gender.”

His comment has the desired effect: Dean’s eyes crinkle up at the corners as he laughs, and he sways a little closer again. “Yeah, well... you’re still all... male-shaped.” He gestures up and down Cas’s body, his eyes lingering where his tie isn’t quite tightened.

Cas moves forward too, taking that last step into what can be properly termed Dean’s personal space. “We don’t have to do anything, Dean. Not right now. Not ever, technically.” Even though that would possibly kill him with frustration, it is still an option.

Dean chews his lips and his eyes continue to dart over Castiel, from his throat to his eyes to his hair to his lips. “Yeah, but...” He shifts and his eyelids flutter low.

“What, Dean?”

Dean looks up after a moment, meets Cas’s gaze with eyes a little darker than before. “What if I want to?” His voice is low, silky, and there is a small bloom of warmth low in Castiel’s belly.

“In that case...” Cas sucks in a deep breath. “I’m... remarkably open to suggestion.”

That gets a smile out of Dean, an edge of white teeth showing between his open lips. There isn’t a trace of worry or fear left on his face, just... curious want. He pushes off the dresser to close the last of the distance between them, reaching up to brush his thumb over the edge of stubble below Cas’s cheekbone, fingertips grazing over Cas’s ear -- sending a shivering chill down his neck -- and then sinking into the soft locks of hair behind it. Cas’s eyes drift closed, and he brings up one hand to press Dean’s tighter to his cheek. Dean’s other hand joins it on the other side.

The gentle nudge of Dean’s forehead against Castiel’s makes him open his eyes again. He’s so close he can barely see Dean at all, but he maps his face all the same: the shape of bone around his eye, the sweep of his brow. It’s not a kiss, but it might as well be for the way Cas strains toward him, the tingle of anticipation sweeping over his lips. Dean breathes out a long sigh while Cas’s breaths hitch higher. It’s hypnotic, the rise and fall of their breathing and the rush of Dean-scented air over his face. He detects mint, and it occurs to him to hope his own breath is acceptable because he had not had that foresight. He nuzzles his face forward until he feels the tips of their noses brush, and stays. Just stays.

“Can I kiss you?” Dean whispers into the quiet space between them.

Cas nods. “Please.”

It’s slow, careful, the tic of Dean’s head to one side to slot his nose beside Castiel’s. From this close distance he hears more than sees Dean wet his lips in anticipation. The moment their lips brush is like the moment a rock tumbles into a canyon or a spark is fanned into a blaze. The electric shock of Dean’s mouth on Castiel’s, the rush of his exhale, and Cas surges forward to meet him, slotting their lips together and pressing in. Dean huffs a quiet groan, almost not enough to be heard, but hear it he does, greedy as he is for every part of Dean. He answers with his own long moan as their lips catch and slide, as they open to taste each other. Cas moves his hands to spread across Dean’s waist, the lower curve of his ribs, pulling him closer. Dean comes willingly, drawing Cas into the circle of his arms.

The brush of their chests together, the warm envelope of Dean’s body, feels so much like coming home that Castiel wonders if he might cry. He can’t stop his hands from circling up and down Dean’s sides, from shoulder blade to waist to hip to the small of his back and back again. His layers of shirts rustle and bunch with the motions and he wants suddenly, desperately, to feel this without the barriers.

Cas pulls back, forcing his hands to settle for a moment at the dip of his trim waist. He looks at Dean -- takes in his wetted, puffy lips -- _I did that_ \-- and his dazed, glossy eyes -- _**I did that**_ \-- then reaches up to card tenderly through the hair that has started to droop over his forehead. Dean watches his fingers. Cas can feel the jump of his stomach muscles when he laughs, just a little.

“May I take this off?” Cas plucks at the flannel overshirt. Dean nods with a whispered “yeah,” so Cas pushes the heavy fabric off Dean’s shoulders and arms, takes a moment to shuck his trenchcoat too. Much better. In only a T-shirt, Cas can feel the suggestion of smooth skin under his hands, can feel the heat and muscular shape of Dean’s body. He pulls close again only this time he buries his face in Dean’s neck and takes a moment to just breathe there. He sighs with quiet voice, finding the source of the intoxicating scent, and he opens his lips to inhale _Dean._

“Cas...” Dean breathes softly in his ear, his arms going tight around Cas’s shoulders, his waist. Cas answers by dropping his hands down to the small of Dean’s back and pulling him in, pressing their hips together and turning this from something soft and gentle to something sweetly hot and aching. He gasps against Dean’s neck when he feels their groins nestle next to each other, tendrils of arousal just starting to coil tight.

Dean moans, breathy and low and right in his ear, and his hips start to rock, pushing and withdrawing in tiny movements that make it difficult for Cas to breathe. It was only supposed to be a hug, and they could still pretend that that’s all this is, but Cas can’t help it; he feels like he’s about to vibrate right out of his skin with the beating of his own heart. Sensation is pooling in his cock, blood-hot, pulsing, firming up in his slacks, and the answering rise in Dean’s jeans is more and more obvious with every roll of his hips. And still, Cas just holds on as they sway gently into each other, letting out puffs of breath open-mouthed against the skin just below Dean’s shirt collar. He has a sudden urge to sink his teeth in there, to suck a mark onto Dean’s skin to tell the world and all of Heaven and Hell that this one belongs to _Castiel._

“Dean?” Cas whispers against the slope.

“Yeah?” Dean pants back.

“I want to -- um.” Cas bites down on his own tongue. He knows what he wants, but is suddenly woefully aware of his inexperience and uncertain of his desires.

“Just ask,” Dean murmurs into his ear, his hand skimming from the top of his neck down to the small of his back and back again in long motions -- probably meant to be soothing but it just strokes the fires higher.

“I want to mark you. Right here.” Cas presses his lips and nose to the spot of skin that has him so fascinated.

Dean’s breath punches out of him and his hands grip suddenly tighter. He nods quickly, the stroking hand coming up to sink into Cas’s hair and clutch him close, and Cas has to take a moment to catch his breath before he opens his mouth against Dean’s flesh. He doesn’t bite hard, but hard enough and with enough suction to bring blood to the surface and to send Dean’s pulse and breath racing. Dean groans and tilts his head, baring more skin to Cas’s teeth. Cas moves his lips and his teeth up and down the line of Dean’s neck, following the flush that blooms there, suckling and nipping until Dean is shivering in his arms and he can suck the lobe of his ear between his teeth.

Before Cas is even close to finished -- he won’t ever be finished -- Dean is shuffling forward into him. Cas lets himself be moved back a step, two, and feels his heels hit the bed frame. He drops down on the duvet, and then Dean is over him, herding him onto his back across the bed. Cas’s shoulders hit the mattress and his back arches, surging up against Dean’s pressing weight. He finds himself looking up at Dean looming over him, braced on strong arms and straddling Cas’s hips. His eyes are wide and vulnerable, his lips hanging open. Cas still can’t keep himself from touching every part of Dean he can reach, reveling in his newly-granted permission.

“Cas, I --” Dean swallows, leaning their foreheads together again. Cas murmurs a soft shushing sound, nosing and angling up to slide their lips together, to lick his way into Dean’s mouth. Dean seems to get lost there fore a few minutes, whining sweetly at the back of his throat before breaking back to ask “Are you sure this is what you want?”

Cas raises his eyebrows. “Yes, Dean, I’m sure.”

“Because if we do this --” Dean stops, fear edging into the corners of his eyes again. “If we do this, it’s gonna change things. There’s no going backwards.”

Cas is honestly not sure what to make of that. He tilts his head, trying to parse Dean’s fear. “You say that like you think I might want to.”

“You never know -- you might.”

“Dean.”

“But --”

“I think I know what you’re afraid of.” Cas’s tone is gentler now, and he smiles a tiny, skittering smile, carding his hands through Dean’s hair. “It’s like when you dream of flying. You are terrified of flying in real life, right?”

Dean swallows and nods. Cas just keeps petting his hair, his shoulders, his arms. “But in your dreams... tell me what it’s like.”

“I mean, you know.”

“Tell me anyway.”

Dean’s eyes slam shut. “It’s. Uh. Happy. Really, really happy.” He huffs a laugh with a shy little closed-eyed grin. “It’s the friggin best, actually.”

Cas cards his hand through Dean’s hair, places a gentle kiss on his lips. “That was the first dream of yours I ever visited. It’s why I kept coming back. I wanted to see you like that. Euphoric. You don’t have to be afraid there because you know you won’t fall, and you’re just... thrilled to be flying.” Dean starts to look down, look away, draw back, but Cas pulls him back in with a hand on his cheek. “You don’t have to be afraid here, either, Dean. You deserve to fly.” He leans in, kissing Dean’s forehead, the bridge of his nose, his tear-damp eyelashes when they flutter down to brush against his cheeks. Whispers against his lips: “And I’m not going to let you fall.”

With a broken moan that ends on a whimper, Dean crushes their mouths together again, delving deep and wet into Cas’s mouth. Dean lets his arms fold so that his weight presses Castiel into the mattress, wraps them tight around his angel’s shoulders. Cas’s hands find their way up under Dean’s t-shirt. He is soft over his muscles, fit but touchable, and Cas takes great joy in digging his fingers in and feeling where Dean shivers. Then Dean sits up on Cas’s hips and the sudden weight of him pressing against Cas’s groin has him arching up, chasing pressure and friction for the swollen ache of his cock. When Dean tugs his T-shirt off over his head, it leaves him mussed, bright-eyed and grinning, bare to the waist. Something inside Castiel snaps. He surges up, wrapping Dean in his arms to flip him over and lay him down on his back.

He is done with slow and careful. Castiel _wants._ He is going to show Dean bodily that he has nothing to fear.

“Oh -- fuck yeah --” Dean’s words are shuddery as he scoots further up on the bed. Cas crowds over him, not giving him room to close his legs or in any other way hide himself. Dean’s eyes are round and wide, watching him, as Castiel descends to kiss him again, thoroughly, all roving hands and rolling hips. Cas’s fingers ghost down Dean’s throat, find and toy with his nipples -- that gets him a hissed-in breath and a full-body twitch -- and follows the shivers down the skin of his stomach before landing at his jeans and thumbing the button. Dean grabs his hands then and does a bit of shoving of his own. “You --” he growls, “still have a shirt on.” Then he is pushing at Cas’s jacket and pulling at his tie. Cas shoves off his own outer layer as Dean pulls his tie off over his head and they both start to wrestle with the shirt buttons. They fumble in their urgency, toy briefly with the option of simply pulling it off over his head (cuffs put paid to that plan) before Dean dissolves into helpless laughter. “Oh, shit,” he sighs. “There goes the mood I guess.”

Cas is grinning too, captivated by the sheer joy of Dean -- undiluted, unaffected, unguarded Dean -- and then he yanks with a touch of angelic strength, and the remaining buttons scatter. Dean’s eyes go wide and he licks his lips a little. “Ok, maybe not,” he says, before swooping in to latch his lips onto one of Cas’s nipples. Cas hisses in surprise, clutching Dean’s head to his chest and pushing into the grip of his lips and teeth. “Oh,” he sighs. “I -- I had no idea.”

Dean looks up and gives a quiet “hm?” against Cas’s skin.

“I didn’t know -- that with -- Oh --”

Dean lifts his head and smirks. “Keep talking,” he murmurs against Cas’s skin before returning his tongue to the sensitive nub of skin. Cas huffs.

“Dean,” he rumbles, then manhandles him back down to the bed, backing him up against the pillows. His hands go straight to the fly of Dean’s jeans. “This was the deal, wasn’t it?” he asks with eyebrows lifted.

God, Dean is _alive_ below him, pushing his hips up into Cas’s hands and whimpering when Cas’s fingertips find and rub the bulge under his zipper. His mouth falls open, then snaps shut to stopper a breathy groan. “Please,” he whispers, head falling back and eyes closed.

Cas‘s fingers shake and he holds his breath as he thumbs the button free. A slow lift of Dean’s hips and the zipper works its way down of its own accord. Cas helps it along by working his hand inside to cup the firm ridge of Dean’s cock through his underwear.

“Mmmmffffuck,” Dean huffs, and then he’s pushing his jeans down off his legs, squirming out of them. He leaves his boxer briefs. “Your turn,” he says, his eyes fever-bright, and then he is on his knees and bowling Cas back onto the mattress. He doesn’t quite seem to know what he wants to do with his hands, fumbling from hair to throat and hips to stomach, then around to the small of Castiel’s back. What Cas wants is to get his suit pants off, tired of the constricting fabric around his erection. He needs -- needs skin. Needs pressure, needs touch, needs anything. Needs _Dean._ He kicks his shoes off -- not really sure why he didn’t think of that before -- then fumbles blindly with the clasps of his pants, wrestling with the catch and ending up tearing the threads.

“You need less complicated clothes,” Dean groans into his neck. But then his hands settle on Castiel’s hips and he pushes his pants down while Cas lifts up. He only gets them down as far as Cas’s knees before he is over Cas again, pressing close.

This time the brush of Dean’s erection against Cas’s has him gasping through his teeth, head thrown back, brow furrowed and a breathy “Ah!” escaping his throat. He grips Dean’s hips, fingers like iron, and lets himself grind up. He is hot, so hot, and firm as stone in his boxers. When Cas circles his hips he can feel the ridges of their cockheads catch on each other -- it ignites a fire in his gut, his groin, sensation tingling down to his clenching toes and up his neck in a flush. He does it again and again in uncontrolled, thoughtless rutting until Dean rolls off to the side and Castiel follows. He takes a moment to kick off his pants -- Dean helps him remove his socks -- before throwing one knee over Dean’s hip and clutching.

Yes, yes, _there._ He could never have predicted how the maneuver would open him up, but suddenly he is shivering with the need to feel Dean on top of him, holding him open. He hikes his knee higher until Dean gets the idea and grabs hold under his thigh and bends him open, knee almost to his armpit. Cas whines. He can feel wetness slicking the inside of his own underwear. He wonders if Dean’s are the same, and _fuck._

“Fucking Hell, Cas,” Dean moans into the space below his ear as his hand slides, slow and deliberate up the back of Cas’s thigh. There is a tiny rush of cool air on overheated skin right where thigh meets asscheek as his fingertips lift the hem of Cas’s boxers and tease the sensitive crease. Cas feels the tremors race over his skin from that spot, so close to so many places that he desperately wants Dean to touch.

“Can I taste you?” The words come tumbling out of Cas’s mouth. He’s only half certain he knows what he means by them, but Dean seems to know, judging by the way he grips tighter, groans deeper, then nods vigorously and withdraws back to the pillows.

The loss of Dean’s heat is lamentable, Cas’s skin feeling hungry and cold already, but he consoles himself by looking. There is so much _Dean_ on display for him. This is absolutely different from when he has seen Dean in dreams. This Dean is real, flesh and blood and nerves and he _wants this._ Wants this with Castiel. When Cas leans in to kiss it is the merest brush of lips, chaste and tender. The urgency is still there, bubbling under Cas’s skin and evident in the twitches that run the length of Dean’s body when Cas scrapes his fingernails lightly over his chest and stomach. But for a moment, Castiel slows, gentles. Kissing Dean is like speaking a new language -- with every attempt Cas feels more fluent, more well-versed in the shape and taste of Dean’s lips, the flicks of his tongue. He feels Dean take in a deep breath and let it out slowly, carefully, trembling under the tenderness Cas is offering.

There has been so little tenderness for Dean. It makes Castiel ache.

“That’s -- not what I thought you meant, I gotta say,” Dean huffs when Cas lifts his lips.

Cas smirks, shifting his hips against Dean’s again. The fires do not take much urging to re-kindle. “Oh? And what exactly did you think I had in mind?” he asks.

“C’mon man, don’t make me say it,” he says, but there is a flush in Dean’s cheeks and he is grinding up to press their erections together again, so Cas just smiles a wicked smile and says:

“It would be helpful if you were specific.”

“Fuck!” the expletive explodes out of Dean and he nods, thighs tightening around Cas’s hips. “Okay,” he says. Swallows thickly. “I want.” Opens his eyes. “I want you to s-suck me off.”

The words, Dean’s lust-blown pupils, almost ruin Castiel in that moment. Without any further dawdling, he shucks his own boxers and then reaches for Dean’s. A little bit of awkward leg maneuvering and they are gone, and Cas is face to face with Dean’s cock, arching thickly toward his navel, head exposed and weeping. Cas inhales his warm salty musk, human and potent, and he buries his nose in the dampish curls at his groin just to get closer. Then he wraps his fingers around the length of his prick, slides the foreskin up and down over the head once, twice, then leans up to wrap his wet lips around the dewy tip.

“Fuck, fuck! Fuck,” Dean chants, hips restlessly in motion, clearly trying to keep a rein on his thrusts. Cas wishes he wouldn’t. He wants to feel him, wants the weight and pressure of this intimate part of Dean on his tongue, in his throat. The silken slide of skin over firm flesh is heady against his tongue. Cas sets to swirling over the head, hoping to make up for any lack of skill with abundant enthusiasm, letting precome and drool drizzle down the shaft and over his lips. His mouth makes obscene slurping and sucking sounds, but Dean doesn’t seem to mind. He has both hands fisted in the sheets by his hips. Cas reaches out with his free hand to pull one of Dean’s hands free and place it in his hair.

The response is a quickly-bitten curse and Dean soon has the fingers of both hands tangled up in Cas’s hair. Cas curls his hands under Dean’s ass cheeks and presses his hips up, forcing Dean’s cock further down his throat, greedy for it -- wanting the strain, the penetration. “Oh -- fuck --” Dean moans as his thighs fall apart, trembling. Cas spreads his cheeks with a drag of his palms, dips his fingertips down into the cleft, the secret hollow of Dean, brushing over the clenched furl of his hole. A wildfire of lust burns through him and he presses with a thumb, just a little, _inside --_

Dean’s hips leap in his hands. Cas’s eyes go wide as he gags, and he pulls off Dean’s cock to look up at him, a string of saliva and precome pulling from his slack lips. Dean’s gasps are lusty and ragged, but too rapid for comfort.

“Dude,” he rasps, “I -- I don’t know if -- I mean, I know I... I dreamed about it but...” Dean’s face is bright red from his throat the roots of his hair and Cas can’t decide if it’s arousal or embarrassment. Possibly both.

“Shhhh,” he murmurs, sitting up and petting one hand down Dean’s stomach, gentling. “It’s alright.”

The tension seems to melt from Dean’s muscles, and he continues, “I want to, with you. I just wanna--” He opens his eyes and Cas can see the earnestness in them, the nervous want. “I wanna work up to that.”

“You could...” Cas has a flash image of himself face down in the pillows with his ass in the air, Dean’s hands gripping his hips while he moves behind him. Dean, cock deep inside, spearing right through him to the core. The thought puts a restless movement in his hips, phantom fucking, and he feels his own cheeks blaze. “We could try the other way around?” he suggests, his voice sounding ruined and eager.

Dean growls and thrusts up, fisting his own cock for a moment. A bead of precome wells at the tip and Cas catches it with his tongue, panting over the head. Dean watches him with eyes dark and heavy, a roguish grin spreading his lips. “Next time, okay? No reason we gotta do everything all at once, right?”

And that’s -- Cas has to kiss him then, has to. He pulls himself up to slide their mouths back together, his arms snaking under Dean’s shoulders, and Dean’s groan is luscious and long. Cas finds himself in a cradle of Dean’s body, arms and legs all tight around him and their bodies pressed together, cocks lined up and leaking against each others bellies. With Dean groaning into their kiss, clutching at him like that, Cas has no room to doubt just how much Dean wants this, wants him. And the tantalizing promise of more of this -- more chances to explore one another, to learn Dean’s skin and his twitches and how to make him melt into the mattress or cry out in passion -- it will never, ever be enough. This is his new addiction. Cas worms a hand between them, all at once desperate for more friction, to touch himself, to touch Dean, just to touch --

Dean tosses his head back, breaking their kiss for an open-mouthed gasp and an “Oh fuck yeah--” as Cas wraps his palm and fingers around both their hard cocks. The shock of pleasure when he squeezes them together ricochets through Cas’s whole body. He makes his fist a tight channel for them both to fuck into and against each other; he feels the slick drag of Dean’s foreskin, still wet from Cas’s own mouth, like sips of ambrosia and fire in his bones.

Suddenly Dean’s limbs gain strength and purpose, knees gripping his hips and arms at his shoulders. Cas finds himself on his back in the next instant, Dean’s weight bearing him into the mattress. Castiel keens, high and helpless, trying to buck against Dean’s weight, but he is pinned. Dean holds himself over Cas with one arm braced in the pillows and wraps his other hand tight over Cas’s hand around their cocks. His eyes slam shut and there is an intense furrow of concentration on his brow, one lip caught between his perfect white teeth.

Cas surges up to capture that lip for himself in a wet, sloppy kiss. Friction sparks with the rutting of their pricks together, and Cas feels the fire start to build inside him. Dean is even closer to the edge, his whole body tense and shuddering and his breaths panting hot over Cas’s lips. Cas just hangs on, his free hand roaming the muscles of Dean’s bracing arm, over his shoulder, up to grip his hair and then down to the curve of his spine. He hangs on and watches as Dean abandons his control. The channel of their fists grows slicker and slicker with both of their combined excitement. When he looks down Cas can see the heads of their cocks slicking in and out of their hands, blood-red and damp and mouth-watering.

“God, Cas, I’m gonna --” With a few last firm, stuttering thrusts and a wring of their hands, Dean shatters, crying out high and wordless into Cas’s neck as his release spurts between them, smearing over Cas’s belly and the lower curve of his ribs. Cas clings onto his shuddering body, desperate witness to his ecstasy, bowing up against Dean’s pleasure. He is so close -- his prick is so hard and throbbing that he feels like it might actually burst, the head swelling obscenely with his heartbeat. Then Dean sits up, flashes him a dazed and satisfied grin, then crawls down his body, still shaky in the limbs and his cock dripping the dregs of his orgasm on Cas’s thighs. Before Cas can process what’s going on, Dean is shouldering between Cas’s trembling thighs and his tongue is skimming through his own mess on Cas’s belly, down to engulf Cas’s come-wet cock in his mouth. And that is _it._ Castiel has no willpower left for restraint. His hands fly to Dean’s skull and he just grabs on, unable to stop himself from fucking his prick between Dean’s wet lips, over his wicked tongue. Dean just mewls around him and swallows him down, panting through his nose. Cas feels the head of his cock squeezing past Dean’s soft palate and down his throat -- and he _comes,_ splay-legged and shaking, comes like holy fire rushing through his limbs, scouring him clean, cresting and ebbing thick and sweet from his swollen prick. And Dean -- Dean is watching him with flush-pink cheeks and wide, liquid eyes, his lips stretched as he swallows down Cas’s release. Cas has to shut his eyes from that sight, weathering another near-painful pulse of pleasure. He doesn’t let go until Cas is soft and oversensitive, still twitching and staring blankly at the ceiling.

Dean flops down on the mattress at his side, a polite distance away at first but soon edging closer. He ends up with his chin on Cas’s shoulder and one hand skimming over Cas’s sweat-damp chest. After a few moments Cas heaves a great sigh, tilts his head so that it knocks into Dean’s.

For a several long minutes they just let their heartbeats slow together, fingers making vague patterns on skin, sunning themselves in the afterglow. Then Cas says, softly, “I’m glad you came to Denver.”

Dean grins against his shoulder and pulls Cas a little closer. “Yeah, me too.”

Another space of several breaths passes before Dean says, softly, “I’m glad you were in my dreams.”

“Yeah. Me too,” Cas murmurs.

Cas turns his head so that he can focus on Dean’s eyes, open and clear like chips of jade, just inches from his own. He doesn’t say anything, just laces his fingers through Dean’s and raises their hands so he can press his lips to Dean’s knuckles. Dean’s grin is a delicate thing, a thing with butterfly wings, but he tightens his grip on Cas’s fingers and brings them to his own lips to return the kiss. “Yeah,” he says. “Me too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Goin' to California, Led Zeppelin](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDIz4talyQk) makes a brief appearance in this story.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This coda comes with a musical accompaniment! [Fleetwood Mac's You Make Loving Fun.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNPQx_Bb2Fo)

.vi

When Cas opens his eyes to golden sunlight, a shining field, and a blue blue sky, he smiles. He is riding shotgun in the Impala and Dean is singing as he drives, the song asking if he believes in the ways of magic, cos I’ve got a feeling it’s time to try.

“Hello, Dean,” he says. Dean turns, looks him up and down -- and grins.

“Hey, Cas,” he says, then reaches out to grasp Castiel’s hand where it rests on the seat between them. “Ready to fly?”

Cas’s heart leaps, and he nods. Dean looks up through the roof of the Impala. Cas spreads his wings -- visible in this dreamworld as huge feathered things, inky black speckled through with blue and white, and tawny at the tips. Together they rise through the roof into a sky full of huge, sun-lined clouds. Dean’s whoops of laughter and joy echo in the soaring vaults, and when they swoop close to one another Cas feels the rush of it all the way down to his fingertips, his toes, the tips of his wings which, outside of dreamland, have been broken and stripped, but here in Dean’s heart are strong and bright and perfect.

They play in the clouds and the sun for what feels like ages. Dean chases Cas until Cas lets himself be caught, then Dean dives into an enormous cloudbank. When he comes out the other side, swirls of water vapor are clinging to his own wings -- ivory and gold, emerald-flecked, tipped with white so bright it rivals the linings of the clouds. He soars and circles, stretching them wide in the sunshine and Castiel thinks what an incredible angel he would have made, rivaling the might of Micheal and better -- _more good_ \-- than any of them.

When finally they draw close again, their wings nestle close to create a cocoon of feathers around each other. Sunlight dapples through, blue and gold, peaceful. Secure in each others arms, floating serenely through the ether of Dean’s own mind, Cas presses his forehead softly to Dean’s and just... breathes him in.

“Never let me fall, Cas,” Dean whispers, and it sounds more like a promise than a request. Cas answers anyway.

“Never.”

When Dean kisses him, Castiel feels a soaring within himself. He feels, finally, like he has found where he belongs.

He is home.

~fin~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much to everyone for reading. Please drop me a comment if you enjoyed -- comments are as good as gold and I treasure each one.
> 
> If you'd like you can also find me on tumblr at [jemariel.tumblr.com](https://jemariel.tumblr.com) I'd love to see you there. :3 Cheers!


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